Science : A Four Thousand Year History [1 ed.] 9780199226894, 019922689X, 9780199580279, 0199580278

Citation preview

Science:A FourThousandYear History rewr science’s past. Patricia Fara shows how has always been driven by the practical of war, politics, and business—-highlighting the rich and fascinating tales behind the abstract theory and esoteric experiments. Rather than glorifying scientists as idealized heroes, she tells true stories about real people—men .(and some women) who needed to earn their living, who made mistakes, and who sometimes quashed their rivals in their quest for success. Fara sweeps through the centuries,from ancient Babylon right up to the latest cuttingedge research in genetics and particle physics, illuminating the financial interests, imperial ambitions, and publishing enterprises that have made science the powerful global phenomenon that it is today. She also ranges internationally, illustrating the importance of scientific projects around the world, from China to the Islamic empire, as well as the more familiar tale of science in Europe,from Copernicus to Charles Darwin and beyond. Above all, this four thousand year history challenges scientific supremacy, arguing controversially that science is successful not because it is always right—but also because people have claimed that it is right.

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Introduction

S

eeing may be believing, but what you see depends on how you look. Figure i instinctively appears wrong, even though there is no intrinsic reason why the

world should not be shown this way up. Putting north at the top is a convention established by early European cartographers who viewed the globe from their own vantage point and did not even know that Australia and Antarctica existed. Created by an Australian, this image is not so much a map as a political statement. It also provides a visual metaphor for Science: A Four Thousand Year History. Writing history is not just about getting the facts right and putting the events in their proper order: it also involves reinterpreting the past—redrawing the world—by making choices about what to put in and whom to leave out. In trad¬ itional books about science’s past, scientists are celebrated as geniuses elevated above common mortals. Like Olympic racers, they pass on the baton of abstract truth from one great intellect to another, uncorrupted by mundane concerns and dominated by their insatiable thirst for absolute knowledge. Through meticulous experiment, logical reasoning and the occasional leap of inspired imagination, they unlock nature’s secrets to reveal absolute truth. In contrast. Science: A Four Thousand Year History is not about idealized heroes but about real people—men (and some women) who needed to earn their liv¬ ing, who made mistakes, who trampled down their rivals, or even sometimes got bored and did something else. This book explores scientific power, arguing that being right is not always enough: if an idea is to prevail, people must say that it is right. This new version of scientific history challenges the notion of European superiority by showing how science has been built up from knowledge and skills developed in other parts of the world. Rather than concentrating on esoteric experiments and abstract theories. Science: A Four Thousand Year History explains how science belongs to the real world of war, politics, and business. Compared with areas on a map, it’s hard to draw lines around the edge of science. Greek philosophy, Chinese astronomy, and Renaissance anatomy bear lit¬ tle obvious resemblance either to each other or to modern high-tech research projects, but they do somehow seem linked. Pinning science down is difficult. One obvious if irritating definition is to say ‘Science is what scientists do,’ but

Introduction

XIV

Fig. I

McArthur’s Universal Corrective Map of the World (1979).

The last part of the caption reads; Finally South emerges on top. So spread the word! Spread the map! South is superior. South dominates! Long live AUSTRALIA—RULER OF TFIE UNIVERSE!!

even that circular description limps, as the word ‘scientist’ wasn’t invented until 1833. Writing about science’s long-term history involves tracing the origins of something that didn’t exist until relatively recently, and so it means considering people who weren’t doing whatever it is that scientists do now. Many of this book’s characters are included not because they were scientists, but because they developed a variety of skills—navigating by the stars, smelting ores, preparing herbal medicines, building ships, designing cannon—that contributed to the glo¬ bal scientific enterprise of today. When looking at the past from a fresh angle, deciding which questions to ask is as important as ferreting out new information. Instead of worrying about what science is or isn’t, there are more interesting problems to think about. Does reli¬ gion—of any kind—inhibit or encourage science? Are alchemy and magic com¬ pletely divorced from science? Were there really so few women, or have historians distorted the picture by telling too many exciting adventure stories about intrepid

Introduction

XV

men exploring the female world of nature? Is it possible to have different types of science that are all valid? And if there were indeed different sciences in Patna, Persia, and Pisa, then how are they related to each other and to modern science? Such questions have no definitive answers, but Science: A Four Thousand Year History explains why they are important and suggests ways of tackling them. Then there’s the most fundamental question of all: How has science become so import¬ ant? Men like Kepler, Galileo, and Newton were certainly brilliant, but they are celebrated worldwide because science itself has become so powerful. They seem more significant nowadays than they did to their own contemporaries, who gave greater acclaim to classical and biblical experts. Isaac Newton declared that he was standing on the shoulders of giants, but when he published his big book on gravity in 1687, very few people thought it was worth reading. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, science ruled the globe and Newton had become one of the most famous people ever to have lived. This book examines how that happened by looking at how science and society have changed together—it investigates the financial interests, imperial ambitions, and academic enterprises that made science global. In black-and-white versions of the world, science is set apart, as though it were a unique type of intellectual activity yielding unassailable truth. Yet what counts as a scientific fact depends not only on the natural world, but also on who is doing the research—and where and when. Scientific knowledge has never trav¬ elled neutrally from one environment to another, but is constantly adapted and absorbed in different ways: it has geographies as well as histories. These processes of perpetual transformation are still continuing, so that the significance of science will alter still further. Paradoxically, as science becomes ever more successful, non-experts are becom¬ ing increasingly sceptical. Now that governments are preoccupied with fears about global warming, genetic manipulation, and nuclear power, it is clear that scientific, commercial, and political interests are inseparably intertwined. In a sense, the history of science is the history of everything: modern science, technology, and medicine are interwoven, intimately bound up in a giant knotted web with every other human activity all over the globe. Science: A Four Thousand Year History is, like the Australian map, committed to challenging assumptions that appear natural yet have been created artificially—it aims to provoke thought and argument, not just provide information. It looks at the past in order to find out how we’ve arrived at the present. And the whole point of doing that is to improve the future.

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hen and where did science begin? This is not a trivial question, but gets right to the heart of what science might be. Looking back at the past, it

is possible to pick out ideas and discoveries that later became incorporated within a global scientific enterprise. But at the time, they belonged to other projects—finding an auspicious time for religious festivals, winning wars, vindicating biblical proph¬ ecies, and (above all) surviving. This book starts with the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, whose great store of practical knowledge was inherited and passed on to modern science. Babylonian court advisers developed mathematical, astronom¬ ical, and medical expertise not because they were interested in theoretical physics, but because they wanted to divine the future. In contrast, Greek philosophers pre¬ ferred to build up grandiose systems that aimed to explain the cosmos. Although many of their theories now seem bizarre, they were continuously modified and assimilated, dominating first Islamic and then European thought well into the eighteenth century. Science’s very foundations lie in techniques and concepts now often denigrated as magical or pseudoscientific.

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II Jnteractions T

here is no single form of science—what counts as science depends on where and when you're looking. Information, skills, and objects constantly move

from place to place, pass from one generation to the next, and shift as they are adapted to fit local needs and tastes. Although Renaissance scholars claimed to be reviving Greek culture, their scientific knowledge resulted from many centuries of communications and interactions between different peoples and places. Looking back from a British vantage point in the twenty-first century, three interconnected regions were particularly significant for science's future: China, the Islamic world, and mediaeval Europe. Many crucial inventions appeared first in China, which was technologically superior to Europe until the end of the eighteenth century. In contrast, Islamic interpreters played crucial roles in interpreting, modifying, and developing the Greek expertise that reached Europe in the twelfth century. Far from being merely neutral transmitters of abstract concepts, Muslim lead¬ ers encouraged science by building massive libraries, hospitals, and astronomical observatories. In Europe, scientific ideas were pursued most strongly in religious institutions, first in monasteries and subsequently in universities. Scholars trans¬ formed Islamicized versions of Greek theories into a Christianized form of Aristotelianism that profoundly influenced Renaissance investigations of mechan¬ ics, optics, and astronomy.

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Exploration We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, 1942

C

picture is veorth ten thousand words’—when this advertising slogan was invented in 1927, books were cheap, literacy was widespread, and

scientists prided themselves on exchanging information freely. Four centuries earl¬ ier, when Hans Holbein painted The Ambassadors (Figure 12), a complex visual commentary on communication, the printed book trade was in its infancy, only the rich could read, and information about new lands, products, and processes was closely guarded. Now one of Europe’s most famous pictures. The Ambassadors pro¬ vides the only official record that its two subjects—both French diplomats—met in London. Using things rather than words, Holbein showed how travel, money, and knowledge were intimately linked. In depicting this clandestine encounter, Holbein meditated on different ways of obtaining and transferring knowledge during the Renaissance. Traditional media—conversation, letters, hand-copied manuscripts—were being supple¬ mented by printed books, although they could spread error as well as truth. Forty years earlier, Christopher Columbus had set sail across the Atlantic, and people based on opposite sides of the world were starting to exchange plants, animals, and raw materials as well as manufactured goods. Holbein’s painting illustrates how experimental science stemmed from trade and politics rather than from any disinterested lust for knowledge. Renaissance exploration did result in a massive increase of scientific informa¬ tion, but this was a side-product rather than a primary goal. International travellers were less interested in intellectual improvement than in financial profit and ter¬ ritorial power. They brought back unfamiliar plants and animals to use as medi¬ cines, crops, or gifts: slotting them into a global classification scheme came later. Similarly, instrument-makers wanted to earn a living, not decipher the secrets

Experiments

94

Fig. 12

Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors

(1533).

of nature, and equipment that might now be labelled ‘scientific’ was originally designed for practical uses—measuring boundaries, weighing metals, dispensing drugs, producing dyes. Navigators demanded precise details of star movements, compass readings, and wind patterns not to overthrow Ptolemy’s outdated glo¬ bal atlases, but m order to reach their destination safely. Knowledge about the world carried great political and commercial implications, and so it was a valuable commodity to be bought, sold, and bargained over by ambassadors as well as by merchants. In this picture replete with hidden signals, Holbein followed Aristotle’s division of the universe by showing a celestial upper shelf with a terrestrial one beneath. Books and instruments were more closely related then than now, so Holbein grouped them together as complementary sources of knowledge. Above, the mathematical instruments—all identifiable and carefully recorded—were used by navigators to record star positions, measure time, and make more accurate maps. The lower shelf carries an arithmetic manual for merchants, and also a borrowed globe incorporating sensitive diplomatic information added by Holbein himself. International exploration was about profit and possession.

Experiments

95

Yet Holbein’s instruments also depict non-communication.The lute—emblem of both human and cosmological harmony—has a broken string, and the deliber¬ ately misaligned astronomical instruments carry contradictory shadows. Flanking this apparatus stand two men who have been despatched as instruments of the French state to retrieve insider gossip, but they stand silent, their non-committal countenances revealing nothing of courtly intrigues. Similarly, the precise faces of sundials and astrolabes, and the tooled leather bindings of books, provide no guar¬ antee of internal accuracy. Printed words and intricate objects are as unreliable as human beings. Just as lenses produced distorted images, so printing made it easier to spread falsehoods, and—like dissimulating courtiers—pictures could deceive. Printing played a major role in the growth of science, although there was no sudden transition to this new technology. Long after moveable-type printing was introduced in the 1450s, scribes continued to copy out manuscripts, and illustra¬ tions were still drawn and coloured by hand. Merchants realized that rich cus¬ tomers who bought sets of Aristotle’s philosophy or Pliny’s natural history were generally less interested in improving their minds than in enhancing their homes with artistic status symbols, and they marketed limited editions of beautiful but expensive printed books. It was not until the sixteenth century that the commer¬ cial book trade was well established, and publishers had convinced readers that printed books were affordable and identical—well, more or less. Location was crucial for both creating and spreading knowledge. In The Ambassadors, Holbein carefully highlighted how his political globe originated in Nuremburg, renowned for its wealth and culture and Europe’s leading centre for books, prints, and instruments during the sixteenth century. The artist Albrecht Diirer used Nuremburg as a marketing base for sending out his pictures of plants and animals. Although he self-mockingly sketched them being shovelled into ovens to be sold in bulk like cheap loaves, cheap prints had dramatic effects on scientific information. Although Diirer’s famous image of an armour-plated rhi¬ noceros may now seem endearingly laughable, it spread widely and was repeat¬ edly reproduced, becoming rhinoceros reality for countless people who—like him—had never seen an actual specimen. One man above all was responsible for establishing Nuremburg’s scientific supremacy—the astronomer Regiomontanus (Johannes Muller). He moved there in 1471, dehberately choosing a place that not only produced fine astronoinical instru¬ ments, but was also known for‘the very great ease of all sorts of communication with learned men hving everywhere, since this place is regarded as the centre of Europe because of the journeys of the merchants.’^ This prime commercial position helped convince a local businessman to invest in his new press, and Regiomontanus helped to make Nuremburg an intellectual trading post from which information could be carried all over the known world by high-quality books, instruments, and pictures.

96

Experiments

The growth of learning depended not only on innovative authors, but also on enterprising and conscientious publishers. Regiomontanus is far less famous than another Central European astronomer, Nicolas Copernicus, the scholarly cleric who placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the centre of the universe. Yet Copernicus’s celebrated book was printed in Nuremburg, and his fame depended on the publishing networks that had previously been established by Regiomontanus and his contemporaries. Without their initiatives, the revolution¬ ary discoveries of the sixteenth century would have had far less impact. Regiomontanus’s own research was crucial for future science because his books were clear, accurate, and widespread. His ideas reached Copernicus as a student in Bologna, and also travelled to the New World with Christopher Columbus, who was searching for spice routes to eastern India. Although Columbus obstinately maintained that he had reached his original destination, his trading voyage across the Atlantic dramatically altered European visions of the world and resulted in a vast explosion of international information. Regiomontanus initiated astronomical change by tackling Ptolemy, then well over a thousand years old but still a leading authority. He not only provided a better translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest, but also criticized its ideas, produced new astronomical measurements, and in an influential and significant shift of emphasis, insisted that theories should match observations. To make that possible, Regiomontanus checked his proofs meticulously. Hand-written tables of older readings were riddled with mistakes, some of them due to repeated miscopying, others to poor or even invented data—the numerical equivalent of Diirer’s rhi¬ noceros. Regiomontanus made theoretical reform possible because he supplied error-free sets of astronomical measurements. By helping to expand international trading networks, Regiomontanus ensured that books, instruments, and knowledge travelled around the globe as commercial commodities alongside silks, copper, and exotic animals. One obvious spin-off was better geographical knowledge. Just as Columbus valued Regiomontanus’s astro¬ nomical data, so too merchants took advantage of improvements in instruments and printing to sail further and more safely. The Nuremburg globe in Holbein’s picture—made by one of Regiomontanus’s students—incorporates cartographical details purloined from Portuguese sources anxious to protect such valuable infor¬ mation. Armed with new measuring equipment, navigators charted the oceans and coastlines more accurately, although the continental land masses remained largely blank. As international trade expanded, merchants demanded—and got— increasingly detailed, reliable knowledge not only of the world’s dimensions, but also of wind patterns, water currents, and magnetic influences. Information, raw materials, and manufactured goods journeyed in every direc¬ tion, altering the world forever. Influences ran both ways. Europeans indelibly

Experiments

97

marked the territory they settled, but their countries of origin were also per¬ manently changed.The New World provided modern European crops such as pota¬ toes, beans, and tomatoes; conversely, America received not only onions, cabbage, and lettuce from Europe, but also medicines, watermelons, and rice brought over by African slaves. The traders and missionaries who survived abroad were those who followed advice and adapted their behaviour, learning from local guides what to eat and wear. When travellers returned home, they took this information with them, so that European botany, agriculture, and medicine benefited from the expertise of peoples they often regarded as inferior. Asians, Africans, and Americans took advantage of unexpected encounters with Europeans to expand their own economies by supplying food and medi¬ cine, clothes, and building materials. Recognizing that their familiar world seemed exotic to their uninvited visitors, they also provided plants and animals whose main function was to be marvelled at—the rhinoceros that Diirer claimed to have drawn from life was an Indian ruler’s diplomatic gift to Portugal. Enterprising merchants soon established a thriving international trade in natural curiosities, persuading European aristocrats to display expensive wonders of nature alongside their prestigious statues and pictures. This fashion for collecting unusual animals, plants, and minerals started in the Italian courts, and then spread across Europe and into private houses. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the commercial market for curiosities was so great that the diarist John Evelyn reported visiting a Parisian souvenir shop called Noah’s Ark, which sold ‘all curiosities natural or artificial, Indian or European, for luxury or use, as cabinets, shells, ivory, porcelain, dried fishes, insects, birds, pictures, and a thousand exotic extravagances’.^ Global trade stimulated a revival of natural history that originated not in uni¬ versities, but in courts, private societies, and personal collections. At the courts, princes and aristocrats acted as patrons, giving financial support to scholars who mingled with educated noblemen and discussed the latest imports. In cities, med¬ ical men and professors developed their own collections in private museums that became essential tourist stops for privileged travellers, who then reported back to learned discussion groups. Figure 13 shows Ferrante Imperato, an influential Neapolitan apothecary, chemical experimenter, and fossil expert, pointing out his spectacular exhibits to some distinguished visitors. Searching for intellectual enter¬ tainment, they have congregated here to gaze at what was often called a theatre of nature, a metaphor implying God’s involvement as a superb stage manager. This scene illustrates a new way of studying—through conversation, rather than through lectures. In universities, professors traditionally dictated classical knowledge from well-established authorities, and students were expected to absorb rather than challenge existing knowledge. But in societies and museums, scholars and aristocrats discussed questions together, reaching their own conclusions

Experiments

98

Fig. 13

The museum of Ferraute Imperato iu Naples, 1599. Ferraute Imperato, DelVhistoria

naturale {On Natural History, 1672 edu.).

by learning from each other as well as from natural specimens. Naturalists travelled round Europe, visiting other collectors and also incorporating imported know¬ ledge gathered from indigenous experts all over the globe. Despite this change in approach, classical natural history was at first expanded rather than overturned. Imperato has arranged his specimens carefully, but he has grouped them by appearance and origin rather than by any abstract clas¬ sification scheme. Fdis crocodile is stretched prominently across the ceiling not because it is scientifically significant, but because it is large, unfamiliar and expen¬ sive. Renaissance naturalists strove to describe rather than to explain, to compile before they classified, to study the particular instead of relying on grand umversals. Instead of redesigning older catalogues of plants and animals, often drawn up for medical purposes, collectors slotted new specimens into existing categories which had been set up by the Greeks. In addition to specimens, words and pictures also transmitted information about distant parts of the globe. Imperato’s cabinet of curiosities includes fine books, rare and expensive sources of knowledge about nature, but their illustra tions often look very different from modern scientific ones. Sometimes this is because—like Diirer

Experiments

99

and his rhinoceros—artists had never seen the animals or plants they were trying to depict. Just as significantly, illustrators often intentionally produced symbolic rather than lifelike representations. For example, after a Spanish sailor brought back a traditional Central American recipe for preparing a purgative by grinding up a local plant root, his physician drew it as a flower to indicate its importance. Even though wrongly illustrated, apothecaries all over Europe started to sell this imported drug as a safe, effective, and profitable remedy. Realism might seem the only useful style for natural history, but old pictures of plants often appear crudely drawn. This was not because illustrators had yet to acquire the requisite skills, but because they were depicting hidden meanings rather than superficial appearances. Images were regarded as potentially deceptive. The encyclopaedist Pliny told the story of Zeuxis, who reproduced grapes so faithfully that birds attempted to eat them. He was, however, out-manoeuvred by his rival Parrahasius, whose painted curtain fooled Zeuxis into demanding that it be drawn back to reveal the picture behind. Aristotle, Pliny, and the other classical compilers felt that artificial images were unsuitable for revealing nature’s secrets, and so they described in words, not in pictures. In any case, scholars labouring with their heads had little social contact with artists, who were regarded as manual workers. Natural history illustrations were found not in academic texts, but in monastic illuminated manuscripts and in practical guides designed to help healers identify medicinal plants and prepare drugs. Collectors still relied on herbals that had originally been prepared by Greek experts—Dioscorides was particularly valued—and that were repeatedly copied by hand from one generation to the next. Natural history albums acquired a new look in the sixteenth century, when artists started producing large woodcuts in a realistic style, and naturalists began stressing the importance of close observation. Aiming to surpass their classical ancestors, collectors compiled comprehensive, detailed catalogues of God’s natural world. They started with plants, valuable for agriculture and medicine, and only later turned to animals.The most famous encyclopaedia was by Conrad Gesner, a Zurich doctor whose personal collection attracted visitors from all over Europe. Gesner updated the great classical works, incorporating not only realistic illustra¬ tions of familiar animals, but also information about New World creatures, such as guinea pigs and opossums. Inevitably, this tended to be less reliable—natural¬ ists claimed that birds of paradise never land on the ground because commercial specimen hunters routinely chopped off the legs before handing over the gutted skins for inspection. Gesner was a humanist scholar, not a modern biologist. For him, research meant poring through countless books to compile all the information he could find, so that details now classified as scientific—diet, longevity, habitat—were mixed

lOO

Experiments

together with fables and folklore. Take the fox. As well as telling his readers about its appearance, digestibility, and medicinal uses, Gesner provides its name in many languages together with over eighty assorted fox factoids gleaned from Aristotle onwards. Almost half the article is devoted to fox symbolism. Its reputation for cunning still survives, but Gesner includes numerous unfamiliar quotations and proverbs, such as ‘a fox takes no bribes’. For modern readers, his most disconcert¬ ing section describes a fox who holds up a mask in its paws, declaring ‘What a fine head this is, but it has no brain’—an allegorical injunction to value brains more highly than beauty. Incomprehensible jokes and allusions often point to fundamental cultural beliefs that no longer exist. During the Renaissance, myths and masks formed an essential component of fox-ness. Understanding a fox—or any other crea¬ ture—entailed knowing about its moral significance and psychological attributes as well as its physical role in the natural world. Such symbolism made sense, because people envisaged imperceptible occult forces binding animals, plants, and human beings together in a holistic, empathetic universe. Gesner’s speaking fox indicates the importance his contemporaries attached to emblems, symbolic pic¬ tures embellished with mottos, and explanatory verses. Long after realistic pic¬ tures became standard, this emblematic approach permeated representations of the natural world: new-style images were embedded in older thought patterns. ‘With the benefit of hindsight’... but hindsight can be misleading. In traditional accounts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Regiomontanus and Gesner are allocated to science, whereas Holbein and Diirer belong to art. Such harsh disciplinary boundaries had not yet been created, and these four men shared a common quest to find new ways of exploring and representing the world in pictures as well as in words. Tracing science’s history means forgetting about the present and trying to understand the past.Victorian anti-Darwinists found it hard to accept their animal ancestry; modern scientists should recognize that their predecessors included not only university scholars but also herbalists, navigators, witch doctors, and instrument-makers.

I have often admired the mystical ’way of Pythagoras, and the secret magic of numbers. —Sir Thomas Bro’wne, Religio Medici (1643)

I

n 1947, the economist John Maynard Keynes shocked the academic ’world by announcing that ‘Ne’wton ’was not the first of the age of reason. He was the

last of the magicians.’^ Scientists ’were scandalized—they refused to believe that their greatest hero could be tainted by any association ’with astrology, alchemy, and other magical crafts. But historians now agree with Keynes’s verdict. Newton developed rather than rejected the work of the great magi who preceded him, and magical ideas lie at the core of modern scientific knowledge. Renaissance magicians were learned scholars who bore little resemblance to later parodies of black-caped sorcerers summoning up satanic powers. Instead, many magi were respected, well-educated men who made mathematics the key to the universe and remained influential well into Newton’s lifetime. Their ideas and activities strongly affected the future course of science. In comparison with university scholars devoted to contemplating the wonders of God’s creation, magi resembled modern scientists in believing that the more they understood about the world, the more they could change and control it. Magic suffused sixteenth-century art, music, and literature. England’s most eminent magus was John Dee, a university-trained mathematician hand-picked by Elizabeth I to advise her on naval affairs and political strategy, and also to calculate astrologically favourable dates for court events. Although he died poor. Dee remained a powerful icon for younger contemporaries such as William Shakespeare, who used him in The Tempest as a model for Prospero, the control¬ ling magus who intervenes with nature by staging an illusory shipwreck on an island haunted by aetherial music. Thanks to a ‘most auspicious star’ which is astrologically favourable, Prospero is at the peak of his powers when he stage-manages events on his sea-bound kingdom, a miniature theatre of nature that allows the audience to gaze into

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the magical cosmos. Prospero reforms his stranded captives by ordering Ariel, an angelic spirit, to mediate between different realms. Being an immortal intelligence, Ariel can operate in all four Aristotelian elements—earth and water as well as air and fire—whereas Prospero’s human powers are restricted. In his poetic evocation of transformation, Ariel describes how a drowned man is physically upgraded into fine pearls and coral, while at the same time, his soul becomes spiritually purified and approaches God, grand Magus of the cosmos: FuU fadom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade. But doth suffer a sea-change, Into something rich and strange. Sea nymphs hourly ring his kneU: Burthen: Ding-dong^

Ariel’s name had already appeared in the standard text on magic in Elizabethan times, Henry Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy (first published in 1533, in Latin). Agrippan magic not only featured in great works of literature, but was also incorporated into scientific models of the Universe. A wandering magus and Germanic dip¬ lomat who studied all over Europe in the early sixteenth century, Agrippa was important not because of his own original ideas, but because he synthesized earl¬ ier European developments of the ancient Greek and Arabic inheritance. Agrippa’s most important source was Hermes Trismegistus, fictionalized amalgam of several Egyptian priests and supposed author of countless very var¬ ied Greek and Arabic manuscripts (some of them Newton’s favourite reading). Although he never lived, Hermes Trismegistus was no shadowy charlatan, but a key figure in Renaissance culture, allegedly chosen to receive God’s wisdom at the beginning of human history. By the end of the fifteenth century, Hermes Trismegistus had become absorbed within Renaissance religion. He was prom¬ inently portrayed in the mosaic floor of Siena Cathedral, sporting a pointed tur¬ ban and a sage’s beard, and flanked by Greek Sibyls prophesying Christ’s arrival. At Florence Cathedral a canon called Marsilio Ficino translated his supposed writings, which had been randomly grouped together by a monk collecting Greek manuscripts for the Medicis. A devout and scholarly Catholic, Ficino interpreted the incoherent mixture of hermetic texts that he had inherited as ancient Egyptian revelations foretelling the truths of Christianity. Ficino was also studying the works of Plato and other Greek writers that had recently arrived from the Islamic Empire, and he amalgamated these disparate ancient sources to

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produce his own version of Renaissance Neoplatonism—a philosophical blend of Platonic, Christian, and magical ideas. The other major influence on Agrippan magic was cabbalism, a Jewish trad¬ ition said to stem from Moses himself and imported into Florence from Spain by Pico della Mirandola, one of Ficino’s Neoplatonic colleagues. Like Ficino, Pico was fascinated by hermetic beliefs, but he also placed Jewish thought at the heart of the Renaissance occult. In contrast with Ficino’s natural magic, Pico’s cabbal¬ istic magic aimed to tap higher spiritual powers, enabling a magus to access God by communicating with His angels. Pico Christianized the cabbala, envisaging his own soul ascending up towards God as though climbing a cosmic-theological ladder whose rungs linked Aristotelian spheres and Hebraic archangels. Hermeticism and cabbalism may now seem bizarre, but they had a long history. Based on solid philosophical foundations, and reinterpreted by Renaissance schol¬ ars, they contributed to the Neoplatonic ideas that had a great impact on science’s future. Ficino and Pico died towards the end of the fifteenth century, but their Neoplatonism survived for a couple of centuries and became embedded within scientific thought. For instance, Copernicus is regarded as a founding figure in science because of two major innovations—placing the Sun at the centre of the Universe, and insisting on a mathematical approach to the cosmos. These were both Neoplatonic ideals. Like Hermes Trismegistus, Copernicus regarded the Sun as God made visible, and he reintroduced the geometrical cosmologies of Plato and Pythagoras that had been revived by magi. Magicians such as Agrippa fused these hermetic and cabbalistic concepts together, incorporating Neoplatonic thought into a revised Aristotelian cosmos with zodiacal associations. They explained that God’s virtue filters down from angels in the outer realm, passing through the stars and the heavens into the elemental world below. Whereas black magicians bargained with devils and con¬ trolled evil Satanic forces, reputable magi tapped in to natural benign influences, searching for spiritual as well as material improvement. As Ficino put it, just as farmers till their fields in tune with the weather, so magicians are cosmic culti¬ vators who achieve results by accommodating higher forces. By distinguishing between black and natural magic, Agrippa defused the criticisms of Catholics who denounced magi for condoning pagan rites and relying on diabolic spir¬ its. Nevertheless, they still accused natural magicians of presumptuously taking over God’s role by harnessing nature’s hidden powers, by actively changing the Universe rather than passively admiring His omnipotence. Agrippan natural magicians shared with modern scientists the goal of con¬ trolling the Universe through intervening m it. Novices started by learning how to alter the physical world through invoking innate sympathies and planetary

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influences. They had to grapple with some complicated learning. For instance, Leo is a solar constellation and cockerels crow at sunrise; hierarchically, the Sun is superior to both creatures, but cockerels are more powerful than lions because air is a higher element than earth. Using astral associations, natural magicians could divine the future and prepare love philtres, spells, and medicines, some of which were very effective—which is why people were willing to pay them for help. When magicians recommended students to ward off depression by countering Saturn’s melancholic influence with gold of the Sun and flowers of Venus, they were dispensing sensible advice to go for a walk in the country sunshine. More advanced magicians placed great emphasis on mathematical manipulations, draw¬ ing down celestial powers from the stars and planets by mastering numerical sym¬ bolism. At the top level, a fully fledged magus performed religious ceremonies so that he could communicate with the angelic spirits of the intellectual sphere. Magic had both theoretical and practical aspects, and so it appealed to gentle¬ manly scholars as well as to apothecaries, herbalists, and artisans who were already used to handling instruments and preparing potions. Like modern science, magic entailed combining intellectual dexterity with manual skills. Erudite adepts such as Agrippa wrote in Latin for educated readers, while at the other end of the social scale, craft workers used word of mouth or coded manuals to pass on their expert¬ ise. As publishing and literacy escalated in the early sixteenth century, artisans and academics exchanged secret recipes that had been developed over the centuries. Magicians’ specialized knowledge was commercially valuable, and—especially in the German courts—wealthy patrons hired consultants to make their mines more profitable or to improve manufacturing techniques. This hands-on practical expertise was excluded from conventional university curricula, but some scholars explicitly sought progress by turning away from trad¬ itional institutions to embrace magic. In the first half of the sixteenth century, one particularly influential revolutionary was Agrippa’s contemporary Theophrastus von Hohenheim, who renamed himself Paracelsus (against Celsus, a Roman phys¬ ician) to advertise his rejection of the classical past. This abrasive, arrogant man seemed to court opposition. Proclaiming that knowledge should be available to everyone, Paracelsus shocked university authorities by wearing a leather apron for his inaugural lecture and speaking in German. Like Agrippa, Paracelsus travelled around Europe teaching and studying, but he boasted that instead of talking to scholarly sages, he was happy to learn from tramps, old women, and barbers. Paracelsus had a far greater influence than many of his conventional contem¬ poraries. Because he gave public talks in small towns and villages outside the universities, his ideas spread widely and were adopted by many less-educated men and women, first in the Germanic countries and then abroad. Paracelsus reformed medicine by making it chemical, insisting that through his magical techniques.

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he could prepare super-medicines from ordinary matter. He also revived her¬ metic magic, asserting that each human being is a condensed version of the entire Universe—a microcosm of the macrocosm. A fervent Christian, Paracelsus claimed that pious therapists could decipher the correspondences linking human beings to the cosmos, and he subscribed to the doctrine of signatures, which held that nature’s symbols reveal efficacious drugs for related organs, such as yellow flowers for the liver, orchids for testicles. When Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, he knew that his audience would appreciate how a ‘flower...purple with love’s wound’ could makeTitania magically obsessed with Bottom.^ This insistence on searching for specific therapies to counter a particular dis¬ ease was radically different from Aristotelian attempts to rebalance an individual’s internal humours. Instead, it was closer to modern ideas that external agents— bacteria, viruses—attack different parts of the body. Yet despite Paracelsus’s suc¬ cessful cures, the medical elite bitterly resented this bombast who boasted about overturning centuries of learning. Financial interests were also at stake: doctors risked losing their patients if Paracelsus undermined their prestige as experts, and one university dean clamped down on Paracelsus’s recommendation of mercury for treating syphilis because it threatened profits from imported plant remedies. But although his name became a term of abuse amongst educated physicians, Paracelsus had an enormous impact on treatment and training because wealthy aristocrats—including Elizabeth I of England and Henri IV of France—hired Paracelsian therapists to supplement their official medical advisers. Royal phys¬ icians assimilated and adapted Paracelsus’s ideas, so that although his theories lost credibility, his chemical remedies entered mainstream medicine. These new continental ideas reached England, where the greatest English magus was John Dee. Dee devoured books on Paracelsian and Agrippan magic while he was a Cambridge undergraduate. Although he later rejected the univer¬ sity system. Dee became England’s leading Elizabethan mathematician, employed to study the stars for making navigation safer, calculating Christian festivals, and forecasting propitious dates. Dee also learnt how to be a fully fledged magus, boasting about his communications with angels but complaining that he was unjustly vilified ‘as a Companion of the Helhoundes, a Caller, and Conjurer of wicked and damned Spirites’.^ Dee regarded mathematics and magic as complementary, not contradictory. For example, he insisted that architects should make buildings cosmologically harmonious by calculating their proportions to match human dimensions—much like Leonardo’s famous drawing of a man spanning a circle and a square. An early convert to Copernicus’s ideas. Dee calculated the Earth’s movements around the Sun, but also pledged his faith in a hierarchical, magical universe bound together by occult powers. Patronized by the Queen and respected all over Europe for his

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mathematical expertise, Dee was an aspiring magician who poured money into buying instruments, hiring assistants, and—like Prospero—building up an impres¬ sive library of several thousand volumes, the largest in England. Since the univer¬ sities were still teaching the traditional classical curriculum, and the Royal Society had not yet been founded. Dee’s home acted as the country’s major experimental research centre. Far from being trapped in old-fashioned mysticism. Dee heralded the future of science. His books had more immediate impact than the theoretical debates of sedentary scholars because he was interested in practical problems, such as lift¬ ing weights, surveying land, and designing optical instruments. As a Neoplatonist, Dee believed that mathematics was crucial to understanding the cosmos. For him, numbers and shapes carried religious as well as scientific significance, and he regarded them as abstract entities that mediated between the physical, material world and the angelic realm. Writing in Latin for his peers and in English to reach practical men. Dee explained how numbers were essential not only for tracking the stars, but also for mundane activities—planning military tactics, taking legal decisions, making pulleys, maps, and clocks. Operating outside the universities. Dee combined theoretical research with laboratory investigation and practical applications—important features of modern science. Dee also pioneered a new scientific life-style for gentlemen, because he earned money by working in his own home. English scholars at this time were mostly single, secluded in monasteries or universities, while even continental magi avoided marriage in order to keep their souls pure. Dee broke away from all these conventions by living at home, marrying, and trying to support his family from his scientific investigations. Dee and his wife Jane Fromond, a former lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth I, were forced to negotiate ground rules for a new kind of experimental partnership. The lines of authority were blurred. Unusually, he was working inside traditionally female domestic territory, while her tasks now included looking after his livein assistants and entertaining his scholarly guests. Unsurprisingly, as money ran short, they often argued about the need for so many expensive books and instru¬ ments, to say nothing of the paid apprentices who increasingly dominated fam¬ ily life. During the next couple of centuries, this type of domestic collaboration became common amongst scientific entrepreneurs who converted their homes into schools, workshops, and research centres. It was only in the Victorian era that scientists started routinely working in large communal laboratories attached to universities or factories. Before then, science was often a home-based activity that could involve the entire family. Modern science stems not only from university scholarship, but also from every¬ day trades, crafts, and magical practices. At the end of The Tempest, Prospero

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relinquishes his special powers, but only after his charms have permanently trans¬ formed the island’s inhabitants. Similarly, even though John Dee and the other great magi were later denounced as charlatans, their influence survived. Magicians and artisans taught natural philosophers to use their hands as well as their heads— if they wanted to control the world, they had to leave their sequestered studies and engage with physical reality.

3

Astronomy

ANDREA:

Unhappy the land that has no heroes!...

GALILEO:

No. Unhappy the land that needs heroes.

—Bertolt Brecht, The Life of Galileo (1939)

I

n 1939, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht castigated Nazi policies by writ¬ ing a play about Galileo’s heroic behaviour under prosecution by the Catholic

Inquisition. To construct his political parallel, Brecht drew on the appealing mythology of a prolonged war in which scientific revolutionaries—Nicolas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei—battle against religious bigots to place the Sun at the centre of the Universe. Victorian scientists depicted these men as martyrs to reason who sacrificed themselves to keep the flame of truth alight, an image of confrontation between science and religion that still remains popular.Yet when viewed from their own perspective, all three were deeply reli¬ gious, and more concerned about their own lives than in carving out any straight road towards the future. Brecht might have considered fictionalizing another of these astronomical heroes—Copernicus, then more familiar to his German audiences, but also more contentious—because of the long-standing tussles between German and Polish chauvinists to claim him for their own. Rivalry reached a head in 1943, the fourhundredth anniversary of both Copernicus’s death and the publication of his Sun-centred cosmology. On the devolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. After the Nazi regime circulated stamps showing Copernicus with a border of swastikas, Polish exiles in New York retaliated with their own propaganda campaign, commissioning the artist Arthur Szyk to produce a commemorative image of Copernicus as their national hero. Packed with Polish symbolism—the national colours of red and white, the royal eagle, Krakow university’s coat-of-arms—the resulting, vibrant icon (Figure 14) idolizes Copernicus by distorting his scientific significance. Although he worked as a church official, this Copernicus sports an academic’s chain and fur-trimmed cap, and also clasps dividers, the conventional symbol of an astronomer. The lantern impKes that he was a keen observer, whereas Copernicus was primarily a theoretician who

Experiments

Fig.

14 A Polish Copernicus. Coloured miniature by Arthur Szyk (1942).

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took his ideas from ancient books rather than the stars. Misleadingly, the Latin and Polish epithets claim that Copernicus triumphed overnight. In reality, there were few converts even fifty years later, and the so-called ‘Copernican Revolution’ was a long process involving many participants. The planetary diagram is headed ‘Copernicus died, but science was born’, even though—like Newton and many other celebrated innovators—Copernicus had revived ancient wisdom to create new knowledge. Far from being a prominent academic, Copernicus was an undistinguished church administrator protected by his wealthy uncle. After studying at Krakow University, remote but renowned for its astronomy, Copernicus travelled and lectured in Italy, where he encountered Ficino’s Neoplatonic legacy as well as the accurate observations of Regiomontanus and his followers. Copernicus was primarily a desk-bound scholar with his heart in the past. Well-educated in the classics, he used traditional rhetorical techniques and wrote for—not against—his church colleagues. Copernicus searched for order. Like Ficino and Pico, he believed in a harmoni¬ ous, mathematically structured universe, and he applied his Neoplatonic soul to the practical problem of improving forecasts from the stars. Astronomers wanted to find better ways of keeping the calendar accurate and making medical prognoses, but found that Ptolemy’s system (see ‘Cosmos’ in Chapter i) was complicated and sometimes clashed with observations. Just as seriously for Copernicus, Ptolemy’s epicycles were aesthetically unpleasing. By placing the Sun near (although not precisely at) the centre of the revolving planets, Copernicus resolved many of these difficulties. Fie satisfied his Neoplatonic idealism by giving the Sun the most important position and retaining perfectly circular orbits. By eliminating Ptolemy’s cumbersome geometrical fudges, he could sequence the planets in the same order as the times they took to complete their orbits. And of prime import¬ ance for working astronomers, Copernicus proved that his model was as effective as Ptolemy’s for providing predictions. Scientific propaganda makes Copernicus’s book seem momentous, but there was no great roar of protest at the time. Although it was dedicated to the Pope, Fhs Holiness took little notice of this complicated book by a minor Polish func¬ tionary. A heliocentric universe seemed dangerous not because it contradicted the Bible—those objections came later—but because it transgressed common sense and also overturned Aristotelian physics, with its fundamental distinction between the chaotic, corrupt terrestrial realm and the unchanging perfection of the heavens. At this stage, astronomers made few objections because they regarded Copernicus’s model as simply that—a model for calculating planetary positions, not a description of how the Universe really is. Yet Copernicus had smuggled

Experiments

III

in a new way of defining the extent of astronomers’ work, because he unobtru¬ sively suggested that they might consider the truthfulness as well as the usefulness of their cosmological schemes. Hiding behind a rhetorical veil of false naivety, Copernicus apologized for using techniques that had been developed by math¬ ematicians in order to answer questions about reality previously reserved for their intellectual superiors, natural philosophers. Bringing together mathematicians and natural philosophers was a fundamental shift, one that involved social changes as well as intellectual ones. Over a hundred years went by before Newton fused their two approaches together in his book on gravity, making astronomy a mathemat¬ ical science that aimed both to describe and to explain the cosmos. Traditionally, astronomers operated in two separate locations. In the univer¬ sities, astronomy—like arithmetic and geometry—belonged to the mediaeval quadrivium; adopting a mathematical approach, scholars focused on teaching stu¬ dents and calculating accurate predictions—searching for truth was beyond their remit. Outside these scholarly enclaves, the cities provided centres for a great variety of astrological astronomers as well as for craft entrepreneurs who, like Regiomontanus, made instruments and printed tables. Following Copernicus’s innovations, a new form of astronomy emerged within a third setting—the courts. Supported by wealthy princes, educated noblemen built expensive instruments not only to make calculations, but also to discover how the Universe works. In return, their royal patrons gained prestige. Complementing their museums crammed with expensive curiosities, aristocrats’ observatories displayed the wealth they had invested m intellectual pursuits. The most important of these new-style court astronomers was Tycho Brahe, a Danish nobleman who angered his parents by choosing to study low-status astronomy and then leaving the university system altogether. He eventually man¬ aged to get royal funding for a massive observatory on the island of Hven (now a Danish heritage site on Swedish territory). Using the King’s money, Tycho brought together measurement and theory as he sought out the true structure of the cosmos. Behaving like a feudal lord in his island fiefdom, he ruled over his mathematical entourage, building instruments and setting up his own printing press to distribute his results. By the 1590s, half a century after Copernicus’s death, Tycho had compiled impressive sets of accurate data and also devised his own sug¬ gestion for the structure of the Universe. Unlike the scholarly Copernicus,Tycho repeatedly designed, tested, and modi¬ fied his instruments. Figure 15 shows his giant quadrant, a brass quarter-arc around two metres m height and fixed to the wall, used to measure the precise position of a star as it passes by the small sight on the top left. Most of this picture is itself a picture—Tycho and his snoozing dog are part of a mural painted within the quad¬ rant. Behind his outstretched arm lie emblematic illustrations of his observatory’s

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Experiments

EXPLIFig. 15

Tycho Brahe’s mural quadrant.

Tycho Brahe,instmiratice mechanica {Machines of the New Astronomy, 1587).

three floors, each framed by triumphal arches: the rooftop for making night¬ time observations, the library with its immense celestial globe, and the basement devoted to carrying out experiments (including alchemical tests on the best alloy to replace the tip of his nose that had been sliced off in a duel).The real observer is just visible on the right, calling out to his assistants who coordinate measurements of a moving star’s time and position. While he grappled with technical hitches, Tycho was also wrestling with a theoretical dilemma. It seemed clear to him that the Bible supports the common sense, Aristotelian assumption that the Earth is stationary. How could he maintain the pleasing harmony of Copernicus’s system while putting the Earth back at the

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centre of the cosmos? Eventually Tycho found a lopsided answer. According to him, the Sun and the Moon revolve about the Earth, and the other planets circle around the orbiting Sun. Weird as that solution may sound, it explained many observations just as satisfactorily as the Copernican and the Ptolemaic systems. Operationally, it was hard to choose between them, and at the end of the sixteenth century, the three models coexisted, each with its vociferous band of supporters. Like other beneficiaries, Tycho discovered that a king’s backing is valuable but risky. When his royal patrons lost interest, Tycho was forced to leave Hven, but he found a new employer—the emperor in Prague. After Tycho died in 1601 (allegedly from a burst bladder at an imperial feast), he was succeeded by his assist¬ ant Johannes Kepler, an impoverished astrologer and former university teacher who believed—like Copernicus and the Neoplatonists—in a geometrical cos¬ mos with a central Sun. Inheriting Tycho’s accurate data, and taking advantage of the greater intellectual freedom available at the court than within the academic system, Kepler brought astronomy and reality closer together by showing how the Danish observations corresponded to elliptical rather than circular planetary orbits. He was inspired to reach this apparently scientific conclusion from a vision that now seems alien—a musical cosmos structured to mirror God’s perfect geo¬ metrical shapes and bound together by hidden magnetic powers. In Kepler’s harmonious scheme, God spaced out the planetary spheres so that symmetrical Platonic shapes could be nested between them. Figure 16 shows the drawing he made, so large that the sheet was folded to fit inside its book. The outermost sphere of Saturn is separated from its neighbour—Jupiter—by a cube; moving inwards, a pyramid lies between Jupiter and Mars; similarly, other shapes define the orbits of Earth, Venus, and Mercury around the Sun. To the fury of Catholics, Kepler identified the central Sun with God the Father, the external stationary sphere with God the Son, and the space in between with God the Holy Ghost. He also made his philosophical model aesthetically appealing—its dimen¬ sions corresponded to measured distances, and the further a planet from the Sun, the longer its orbiting time. Launching his own new approach to the Universe, Kepler decided that this divine harmony also had a physical influence—the Sun itself, which must be affect¬ ing the motion of the planets. He started by tackling the astrological God of War, Mars. This planet’s orbit clearly deviated from circular perfection, a discrepancy made even more glaring by the accuracy ofTycho’s data. For help, Kepler turned to a contemporary English expert, the physician William Gilbert. Objecting to the way Aristotelians viewed the Earth as inferior to the rest of the Universe, m 1600 Gilbert claimed—citing Hermes Trismegistus^—-that the entire Universe is an animate being with a magnetic soul. Kepler used Gilbert’s ideas to envisage the Sun as a giant magnet that attracts and repels the planets to control their paths

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Fig.

16

Kepler’s nested scheme of planetary spheres and perfect solids. Johannes Kepler,

Mysterium cosmographicum {The Secret of the Universe, 1596).

through the skies. This cosmology was so influential that when Newton started investigating comets seventy years later, he thought they moved magnetically. After many tortuous calculations and blind alleys, Kepler demonstrated that the orbit of Mars is an ellipse, with the Sun lying not at its centre, but asymmetric¬ ally at one focus. However, what might now seem like a great scientific leap for¬ wards was ignored for several decades. Not satisfied with solving the Mars problem, Kepler tried to unify the entire Solar System by proving that Pythagoras had been right—the numerical ratios of the cosmos are musically harmonious. Attributing celestial tones to each planet (low for Saturn, high for Venus), he declared that ‘The heavenly motions are nothing but a continual music of several voices, which can be comprehended by the intellect, not by the ear.’^ Divine aesthetics and astrological influences mattered for Kepler—and however bizarre his approach might seem now,

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it was these musical calculations that enabled him to complete the trio of elliptical planetary laws later incorporated by Newton into modern astronomical physics. Astronomers judged theories by their ability to predict, and Kepler spent years compiling a new set of planetary calculations, tactfully named the Rudolphine Tables to gratify his Prague patron. Emperor Rudolf. It was only in 1631 that Kepler’s elliptical model was observationally vindicated, when Mercury passed in front of the Sun exactly as predicted. By then, Kepler had already died, but another enthusiast was defending the Copernican cause—Galileo, seven years older and a far more effective publicist than Kepler, even though he never relinquished his faith in circular orbits. Galileo’s physical evidence was repeatedly contested, but he persuaded many astronomers that Copernicus had been right. Like Tycho and Kepler, Galileo moved from the university environment to the courts, abandoning his poorly paid teaching with relief after successfully soliciting support from the wealthy Medici princes in Florence. Galileo adver¬ tised the importance of instruments for finding out the true structure of the Universe, but instead of using bulky Tychonic apparatus that measured angles, Galileo relied on a recently invented optical instrument—the telescope. After hearing reports of this Dutch device, Galileo designed his own more effective version, rapidly impressing the Venetian navy with how far he could see, and discovering myriads of stars that had previously been invisible. But contrary to scientific mythology, Galileo’s telescopic images did not immediately convince Copernican critics. Being able to spot ships was very different from making cosmo¬ logical claims. The blurred views were ambiguous, and Aristotelians objected that a humble terrestrial tube was inappropriate for divining cosmic perfection. Rather than winning automatic acclaim for his results, Galileo gained power tactically, adroitly upgrading himself from a mathematician into a philosophical courtier. As he manoeuvred himself into the position of court astronomer to Florence’s Medici family, Galileo adopted several different strategies. Most obviously, he used his telescope to attack—but not to disprove—the traditional Earth-centred model of the universe. Fie reasoned by analogy and probability, never managing to produce incontestable evidence that silenced his opponents. To undermine the objection that a giant body like the Earth could hardly be hurtling through space, Galileo claimed that his indistinct pictures of the Moon revealed a rocky surface, nothing like the smooth celestial sphere promised by Aristotle. Instead, he maintained that it resembled Bohemia—and if the Bohemian Moon could move, then why not the Earth? To demonstrate that the Earth—Moon duo is not unique—a drawback of the Copernican system—Galileo found satellites orbiting around Jupiter. His strongest physical argument was to show that Venus sometimes

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I

Experiments

appears to be a circular disc like the full Moon, an impossibility under Ptolemy’s model. However, even this phenomenon did not convince Galileo’s adversaries, because it is compatible with Tycho’s geocentric scheme. Galileo was an astute campaigner. To ingratiate himself with his aristocratic patrons, he ingeniously named Jupiter’s satellites the Medicean stars because—he claimed—they foretold the successful rise of the family dynasty. To spread his ideas more widely, Galileo made flamboyant speeches at dinner parties and wrote persuasive polemical books. Whereas Copernicus had dithered before modestly addressing a complicated mathematical treatise to the Pope, Galileo drew large audiences with his pithy propaganda pieces, leaving out the formulae and boasting with a conjuror’s panache of‘unfolding great and very wonderful sights... which, unknown by anyone until this day, the author was recently first to detect.’^ Even after the Pope warned him to keep quiet, Galileo tried to attract still more sup¬ porters by publishing his provocative Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems (1632).This book was revolutionary in style as well as in content—Galileo wrote in Italian instead of Tatin, and presented his arguments through a conversation between three thinly disguised fictional characters, caricaturing the mediaeval Aristotelian representative as a simpleton. Voicing the Pope’s own objections through the gullible Simplicio was not a sensible move, and the Pope clamped down on the philosopher who had fla¬ grantly disobeyed his orders, summoning him to Rome for a trial. This was a far less controversial step than it would be nowadays. The principle of free speech had not yet become a political issue, and throughout Europe rebels were routinely silenced in the interests of maintaining stability. Notoriously, Galileo was found guilty, although this was to some extent a show case. His punishment was the mildest possible for an elderly man. Placed under lax house arrest, Galileo continued his research in a comfortable Florentine villa, palming off on his daughter the weekly duty of reciting penitential psalms. Rather than being a head-on confrontation between science and religion, or even between Galileo and the Pope, this was a complex conflict involving rival factions within and outside the Church. Making the Earth move does contradict several passages in the Bible, but not all Christians thought that this mattered—after all, Galileo was himself a devout Catholic, and he had supporters right through the Church hierarchy. Opinion was similarly divided amongst the supposed ‘scientific opposition’. Many astronomers continued to defend either Tycho’s or Ptolemy’s cosmos, reiterating Aristotle’s simple yet persuasive proof that the Earth is stationary: an arrow fired straight upwards lands where it started. Faced with this disagreement amongst scholars, perhaps the Church behaved sensibly by going along with majority opinion and retaining Biblical certainty? Personal ambitions and rivalries were at stake, and if Galileo had manoeuvred more diplomatically.

Experiments

117

he might have contrived to defend his Sun-centred Universe without being offi¬ cially condemned. It was only in the nineteenth century that scientists converted Galileo into a martyr during their own struggles for power. Brecht served his own rhetorical ends by perpetuating their simplified view of a hero battling against Catholic oppression, but it was scientific propagandists who launched the notion that science and religion must inevitably be at war.

4

"Bodies

What thous seest in me is a body exhausted by the labours of the mind. I have found in Dame nature not indeed an unkind, but a very coy Mistress: Watchful nights, anxious days, slender meals, and endless labours, must be the lot of all who pursue her, through her labyrinths and meanders. —Alexander Pope, Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus (1741)

W

hile Nicolas Copernicus searched for God in the stars, Andreas Vesalius was making the human body Gods temple on Earth.The Polish astron¬

omer and the Flemish anatomist, two northerners who studied in Italy, regarded human beings as microcosms of the Universe, sympatheticaUy linked together as complementary parts of God’s harmonious whole. Their great books—one on cosmology, the other on anatomy—both appeared in 1543, and both authors are now celebrated as scientific revolutionaries. Nevertheless, they looked back towards the past. Tike their humanist contemporaries who were reviving classical art and literature, Copernicus and Vesalius wanted to restore ancient knowledge. Vesalius urged physicians to follow the example set by Galen over a thou¬ sand years earlier. Instead of depending on abstract scholarship, he recommended them to study for themselves the best text available—the human body. The son of an apothecary, Vesalius insisted that elite physicians should acquire the skihs of working surgeons. Like many other reformers—Roger Bacon, John Dee, Tycho Brahe—he helped to make science possible by encouraging gentlemanly scholars who worked with their heads to recognize the expertise of craftsmen who worked with their hands. When Vesalius sat for his portrait, he posed with a giant dissected human forearm to emphasize his message that doctors should rely on their hands, whose inner beauty he had himselflaid bare with his anatomist’s scalpel. As the new Galen,Vesahus had one great advantage over the original: he could dissect human corpses. By following Galen’s own advice to look for himself, Vesalius discovered major discrepancies between traditional Galenic anatomy— much of which was based on animals rather than people—and the human corpses that he examined with meticulous care. By using Galen’s own methods, Vesalius

Experiments

119

revised important errors that had been passed down through the centuries by men who pledged their faith in books rather than trusting the evidence revealed by their own scalpels. Traditionally, medical students trained by listening and watching, not by handson experience. They stood below the high official chair of a professor who read out Latin texts, while a surgeon went through the routine of dissecting a corpse, and a demonstrator pointed out important features. Vesalius’s first job at Padua after graduating there in medicine was as a low status dissection demonstrator, but he soon overturned this formalized ritual with its three participants. Vesalius was a flamboyant performer in the theatre of anatomy. As portrayed in Figure 17, the frontispiece of his huge volume of anatomical drawings—On the Structure of the Human Body—Vesalius made himself the single central actor. As his right hand pulls back a woman’s flesh to display her inner abdomen, and his left hand points up towards God, Vesalius encourages the students to clus¬ ter round closely and learn for themselves not only how to identify organs, but also how to operate on them. This deliberately shocking exposure of a woman’s body reinforces Vesalius’s commitment to uncovering truth, while the skeleton is both a teaching aid and a memento mori reminder of life’s brevity. According to Vesalius, the cadaver was a convicted criminal who had unsuccessfully tried to postpone execution by claiming she was pregnant, and the Latin motto at the bottom alludes to Caesar’s mythical birth. Vesalius was proud of his origins. At the top, the text reminds readers that he is from Brussels, and the three weasels on his coat-of-arms refer to his pre-Latin name, Andreas Van Wesele. In this image, Vesalius also boasts about his intellectual predecessors by allying himself to the classical past. The two larger-than-life figures at the front are Aristotle, looking down at the dog waiting its turn to be dissected, and Galen, wearing a physician’s prescription case on his belt. Another of Vesalius’s innovations was to combine drawings with words. Fie delved right inside bones and organs, labelling them with tiny letters so that he could refer to them in the written text. Dedicating the same care to his engravings as Diirer, Vesalius enabled distant students to feel like immediate witnesses because he presented his book in the same order as his actual dissections. It also included many detailed illustrations of his equipment, as well as different parts of the body at various stages of exposure. Fiis most famous images show giant skeletons striding across beautiful landscapes or lamenting the prospect of their own death, but Vesalius also portrayed with unprecedented accuracy the divine structure to be found in nerves and veins, muscles and arteries. Using the language of a Renaissance archi¬ tect,Vesalius described how God had systematically designed the body’s foundation and walls; writing as a practical anatomist, he provided instructions for reassembling skeletons that had fallen apart while being boiled to remove the flesh.

120

Experiments

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I

Societies

Men of science argue, most violently, how the results of their own work could be applied for the benefit of mankind...Yet outside their own departments they are the most arrant diehards. They are, in fact, socialists in their laboratories and Tories in the Athenaeum. —Ritchie Calder, The Birth of the Future (1934)

I

nspired geniuses provide appealing figureheads, but—as Karl Marx said of philosophy—the point is surely to change the world, not just interpret it.

Traditionally, natural philosophers made observations to find out why things hap¬ pen. In contrast, the new experimental investigators of the seventeenth and eight¬ eenth centuries banded together in order to make things happen. By creating scientific societies, they acquired the collective power they lacked as individuals. Newton, for instance, became celebrated all over Europe by taking advantage of a ready-made promotional platform—London’s Royal Society. Without the Society’s support in publicizing his early inventions, experiments, and books, he would have found it hard to gain backing outside his small Cambridge circle. And for the last quarter-century of his life, Newton’s position as the Society’s President enabled him to dominate English research. But although Newton ruled, it was the Society that put science into society. In Gulliver’s Tfaye/s, Jonathan Swift won quick laughs by pouring scorn on fool¬ ish chemists who tried to make gunpowder from ice and mathematical architects who built houses from the roof downwards. But by the time the book was pub¬ lished in 1726, this derisive attitude had already begun to fade away. Throughout Europe more and more scientific societies were being established, all aiming to demonstrate that experiments bring results. By the nineteenth century, govern¬ ments were investing heavily in scientific research and inventors were being celebrated as major contributors to the booming industrial economy. Although science was still mostly reserved for relatively well-off men, scientific societies had contributed to a dramatic change, a pervasive explosion in public science of far greater long-term significance than the individual innovations of solitary scholars.

148

Institutions

Before the middle of the seventeenth century, intellectual activity took place in private rather than in public settings. University scholars lived in secluded com¬ munities, and even the unconventional experimental investigators at Oxford met in each others’ rooms. Compared with the Victorian era, there were no public halls or lecture theatres, so scientific debates took place behind closed doors—not only in scholars’ studies, but also in collectors’ museums, alchemical laboratories, court chambers, artisans’ workshops, aristocratic dining rooms, and magi’s librar¬ ies. Very gradually, the over-riding importance of this private activity declined, and new venues that enabled people to meet together in public appeared. Among the earhest were the English coffee houses, communal rooms that gentle¬ men adopted as their second homes for picking up mail, reading the papers, and discussing the latest developments away from family distractions. Other public institu¬ tions—theatres, lecture halls, gentlemen’s clubs, museums, freemasonry lodges—also flourished. Along with the increasing number of daily newspapers, review journals, and books, they enabled individuals to engage in national debates by expressing their views, acquiring information, and being entertained. Although uneven, this was a Europe-wide phenomenon during the Enlightenment, an era when knowledge and power started to spread outside a narrow ehte and the concept of‘public opinion’— now so familiar—started to play an influential role in decision-making. Sources of power slowly shifted. Governments started to take over from monarchs, and public organizations challenged traditional structures of intellectual doirdnation. The early scientific societies were created as part of this general move towards making knowledge public. Rather than being exceptional, they were just one par¬ ticular type of these new institutions that allowed more people than ever before to participate in organized discussions.The first to have a major impact was London’s Royal Society, initially established by members of the Oxford experimental group—Boyle, Hooke, Wren, and their colleagues—after Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660. Their early meetings took place at Gresham College, a Thames-side navigational centre renowned for its mathematics teaching. As the Fellowship consolidated, they acquired their own meeting rooms near the Strand, the centre of London’s booming instrument trade. Other European rulers soon recognized the status value of acquiring such an intellectual institution, and they encouraged the foundation of their own societies in major cities such as Paris and Berlin. In addition to these national institutions, many provincial towns set up their own smaller societies to discuss literature, sci¬ ence, and current affairs. By the end of the eighteenth century, there were around two hundred—varying in formality and influence—scattered right across Europe and North America. In places as far apart as St Petersburg and Philadelphia, Sweden and Sicily, enthusiasts met regularly to debate the latest scientific ideas and discoveries.

Institutions

Fig. 23

149

Baconian ideology in the early Royal Society. Frontispiece of Thomas Sprat’s History

of the Royal-Society (1667).

Many societies modelled themselves on the early Royal Society. From the very beginning, its founders had no doubt about how ‘to support our owne Enterprise’—they should ‘devise all wayes to revive Lord Bacons lustre’.* Bacon had died some forty years earlier, but he features prominently on the right in Figure 23, the frontispiece of the Royal Society’s experimental manifesto. As the Society’s ideological figurehead. Bacon sits in his official Chancellor’s robes, pointing to the instruments that from now on should be the source of know¬ ledge. On the left, the Society’s first President, William Brouncker, points towards King Charles II, who is being crowned with a laurel wreath by the goddess of fame.This was conventional visual flattery intended (unsuccessfully) to encourage further royal patronage. Although the shelves overflow with books by the latest

150

Institutions

scientific authors—Harvey, Copernicus, Bacon himself—the scene is dominated by instruments.The walls are adorned with modified versions of traditional math¬ ematical devices, while in the background (near the King’s right ear) lie two mod¬ ern innovations, a giant optical telescope and a philosophical air-pump. The Fellows repeatedly emphasized their Baconian ambitions. They aspired to collect observations, establish scientific laws, and use their new-found knowledge for technological inventions to benefit the nation. What happened in practice was rather different. For one thing, although they claimed to have created a demo¬ cratic Society, in reality it was an elitist organization dominated by educated aris¬ tocrats and landowners who formed a new scientific priesthood. Although some instrument-makers did become Fellows, these less privileged men rarely attained positions of power—and women were essentially banned from the meeting rooms until the twentieth century. Although most metropolitan societies followed London’s lead and restricted their fellowships, they reached a large effective membership through their jour¬ nals, which provided detailed reports of the latest experiments. Each copy had several readers, but even those without direct access could read summaries in the growing number of commercial periodicals (at this time, plagiarism was rife and copyright protection non-existent). By producing this written material, the soci¬ eties enabled indirect members to become virtual witnesses, almost as if they had themselves been present at the original demonstrations. The societies’ emphasis on spreading knowledge through print became a fundamental component of sci¬ entific activity. Letters were also important for converting the societies’ discoveries into public knowledge. Both men and women could participate in the Republic of Letters, an imaginary community that linked its intellectual citizens in an extended corres¬ pondence network. Collectors exchanged objects as well as information-—inter¬ esting plants, mineral specimens, new instruments, natural curiosities. Sometimes personal letters were published to reach still wider audiences. For instance, the Methodist preacher John Wesley learnt about the medical value of electrical machines by reading the printed collection of Benjamin Franklin’s letters from Philadelphia to London—and Franklin had initially become fascinated by elec¬ tricity through reading a journal article about some English experiments. As well as spreading knowledge, the societies distributed money. Traditionally, private patronage had supported natural philosophers who—like Galileo—were not independently wealthy. This moneyed influence very slowly diminished as societies gained power and started to establish other types of funding. In London, the Royal Society financed research to only a limited extent. The impecunious Hooke was employed as an Experimental Curator, but since successive kings declined to provide money, the post’s salary remained small, raised by the Fellows

Institutions

151

from their annual fee. However, the French Royal Society came closer to Bacon’s vision of a state-funded organization. Keen to boost his prestige, Louis XIV pro¬ vided salaries for fifteen experts who met twice a week in the royal library and directed experiments towards matters of national interest. The contrasting struc¬ tures of the London and Paris Societies strongly influenced the pattern of sci¬ entific development on either side of the Channel during the Enlightenment. In France, generous prizes and a secure financial base encouraged theoretical investigations and a scientifically oriented government. But in England, research was more self-interested. Wealthy aristocrats pursued their own lines of enquiry, while enterprising inventors—such as Desaguliers—focused on practical projects to generate income. Societies gradually devised ways of levering money out of reluctant monarchs. In June 1760, the London Fellows learnt that Britain’s traditional enemies, the French, had already organized several expeditions to record the following year’s Transit of Venus (similar to a lunar eclipse). To justify their request of/^8oo from the government, the Royal Society emphasized that national honour was at stake: ‘it might afford too just ground to Foreigners for reproaching this Nation [if] England should neglect to Send observers to Such places as are most proper for that purpose and Subject to the Crown of Great Britain’.^ Although the results proved inconclusive, luckily there was another Transit eight years later, for which the Fellows demanded—and got—four thousand pounds. By the end of the cen¬ tury, President Joseph Banks—an aristocratic autocrat who dominated British science for forty years—was strategically loading the Society’s committees with influential politicians who could help to secure state funding. By the time of his death in 1820, Banks had ensured that the Royal Society was intimately involved m Britain’s imperial expansion. Banks was only in his mid-twenties when he experienced at first hand how national interests, government policy, and scientific exploration are intertwined. In the second (1769) Transit of Venus expeditions, often presented as the founding example of scientific collaboration, many national institutions transcended polit¬ ical rivalries to measure the dimensions of the Solar System. However, each Society sent out its own separate team, and only later did they exchange readings. Although Britain and France were for once officially at peace, both countries wanted to con¬ trol the Pacific region, which offered lucrative trade routes and strategic military bases. The British Admiralty grabbed the opportunity of combining an astronom¬ ical expedition to Tahiti with a reconnaissance mission to Australasia, and they sent the captain—James Cook—secret instructions to collect information, seize terri¬ tory, and hand over all his logbooks when he returned. Banks was a paying pas¬ senger who financed his own botanical research—he knew that the government aimed to expand its political possessions rather than its scientific empire.

152

Institutions

When historians judge scientific achievement by publications, Banks’s couple of pamphlets on sheep farming eliminate him from serious consideration. But for those who think it makes more sense to measure performance by influence, Banks appears as a major innovator who made science a high-status activity permeating politics and trade. Banks introduced two new scientific role models. Through his own travels, and also by securing further funding, he consolidated the stereotype of a heroic explorer, the romantic voyager epitomized in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: ‘I voluntarily endured cold, famine, thirst, and want of sleep; I... devoted my nights to the study of mathematics, the theory of medicine, and those branches of physical science from which a naval adventure might derive the greatest practical advantage.’^ Banks made scientific exploration glamorous— and also a sound commercial investment. Banks also personified a scientific type whose importance continued to escal¬ ate during the nineteenth century—the scientific administrator. A wealthy landowner and confidante of George III throughout the King’s intermittent attacks of insanity. Banks took science to the heart of British politics by making himself and the Society indispensable during his long reign as President. Over 20,000 letters survive, testimony to Banks’s control over an international scientific empire. A skilled negotiator. Banks persuaded the East India Company to subsidize a Pacific mapping expedition, but also told the cartographers to bring back commercial information about the Indian market. Financially shrewd, he took advantage of the King’s obsession with Kew Gardens to obtain royal funding for a recon¬ naissance mission that enabled British-owned India to undercut the Chinese tea market. With Banks in charge, the Royal Society participated in every aspect of imperial expansion, making science inseparable from the international search for raw materials and foreign expertise. Committees to discuss colonial development were stacked with Fellows who placed research high on the agenda, so that it was often impossible to distinguish between commercial espionage, diplomatic activity, and scientific investigation. As one of the few Englishmen who had been to Australia, Banks was intimately involved in establishing the penal settlements. And as the world’s most famous botanical explorer, he organized an international network of experimental gardens that transplanted crops and permanently altered the Earth’s scenery by converting far-flung lands into European agricultural lookalikes supporting sheep and cows, wheat and barley. Banks set out to improve the world along the same lines as his own country estate. Like his aristocratic colleagues. Banks believed that he was responsible for maintaining a stable, hierarchical society—he felt it his duty to improve the wel¬ fare of those beneath him by increasing his own wealth. For Banks, it was divinely ordained not only that his low-paid Lincolnshire farm workers should generate

Institutions

153

huge profits for him to spend, but also that African labourers should mine precious minerals to boost Britain’s wealth. Where modern critics detect exploitation, he saw reciprocal assistance. In his view, since India was ‘blessed with the advantages of Soil, Climate, Population so eminently above its Mother Country’, its natural function was self-evidently to supply Britain’s factories with raw materials and bind ‘itself to the “Mother Country” by the strongest and most indissoluble of human ties, that of common interest & mutual advantage’."^ After Banks died, his Victorian successors tried to give the Royal Society a more democratic appearance by obliterating the memory of his authoritarian rule. Seeking prestigious ancestors, they linked themselves directly with Newton, Galileo, and other lone discoverers. But for many scientists, the greatest hero was Bacon, the patron saint of the scientific societies whose collective action had created public science. With his insider knowledge of politics. Bacon had coined the perfect motto to match nineteenth-century ambitions: ‘Knowledge is Power.’

2 Attempts to divide anything into two ought to be regarded with much suspicion. —C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (1959)

F

rancis Bacon compared experimenters with ants, scurrying around to gather up observations for the wise bees—natural philosophers—to digest. But

as books got cheaper and international travel became easier, the sheer mass of accumulated information became unmanageable. Organization was essential. Through imposing order, natural philosophers endeavoured to keep unruly facts under control and convert them into scientific wisdom. The Enlightenment is often called the Age of Classification, the period obsessed with grouping data, objects, and knowledge into systematic categories. Constructing these intellectual filing systems proved hard. Tristram Shandy Senior spent three years compiling his TJUSTHA-pcedia, an organized system of knowledge intended to educate his son, but he progressed so slowly that the first part was out-of-date before he had finished. A less famous fictional pedant. Dr Morosophus, wasted his life away perusing potted entries from Chambers’ encyclopaedia: Chambers abridg’d! in sooth ’twas aU he read From fruitful A to unproductive Z.^

Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopcedia, which appeared in 1728, was England’s great Enlightenment publishing innovation, the first major attempt to marshal human knowledge into a neat alphabetic sequence. But by the end of the eighteenth cen¬ tury, when Dr Morosophus was boring his colleagues, it had been superseded by its imitators—the French Encyclopedie and the Scottish Encydopcedia Britannica. Successive encyclopaedias got bigger, but they also—at least, so claimed their editors—got better. They chose different schemes for carving up their maps of knowledge (a favourite Enlightenment metaphor). Chambers, a self-taught book¬ seller who aimed to edify citizens of the Republic of Letters, admitted that he had somewhat arbitrarily sliced his territory into Arts and Sciences. Fie presented him-

Institutions

155

self as an intellectual explorer who would guide his readers around the domains of well-mapped expertise and protect them from wandering into the wilderness of ignorance. Even so, modern travellers might soon feel bewildered. The road Chambers signposted ‘Rational’ leads to religion as well as to metaphysics and mathematics, while optics and astronomy are approached by the same route as falconry, alchemy, and sculpture. Chambers might have been first, but it was his French inheritors who created the Enlightenment’s definitive Bible of Reason. Like Tristram Shandy, they found their project spiralling ominously upwards, but in 1772 they eventually managed to reach the end of the Z’s: they had compressed knowledge into twenty-eight volumes. Although cross references to non-existent articles did creep in, the Encyclopedie became the French icon of rational taxonomy, modelled as a leafy tree whose sturdy central trunk was labelled ‘Reason’.The editors went back to Bacon for inspiration, drastically pruning his original scheme to squeeze theology into a tiny territory while allocating vast expanses to mathematics and natural philosophy. Over the next few decades, these intellectual boundaries were repeat¬ edly redrawn to found the modern configuration of academic disciplines. Squashed in between cosmology and mineralogy on the Encyclopedie's plan was a relatively new science—botany. Even the word itself was only invented at the end of the seventeenth century, when naturalists first discovered that plants repro¬ duce sexually, and collectors were being overwhelmed not only by countless new species imported from overseas, but also by recent European finds. Although many attempts were made to accommodate the many plants within Aristotelian categor¬ ies, there were too many anomalies—the plant equivalents of deciding whether bats and duck-billed platypuses should be classed as birds or mammals. Unable to cope, Aristotle’s original classification system was finally abandoned. Although taxonomists proposed many new schemes, none of them satisfied everyone. Like shelving books in a library, there was no right way of organizing the natural world, no objective criteria for deciding which classification system was best. Some arguments were resolved by pulling in powerful patrons to act as referees. One French missionary tried to break down the stranglehold of the Dutch spice trade by growing nutmegs on French-owned territory. Flowever, a rival accused him of importing a different, inferior plant with superficial resem¬ blances. Was it or wasn’t it nutmeg? The answer depended on which commercial enterprise a taxonomist belonged to. A similar problem arose in Italy, when a col¬ lector flattered his sovereign with the gift of a hermaphrodite monkey. Museum experts disagreed, insisting that it was a normal female—but with so few monkeys available for comparison, how could anyone be completely sure? One of the earliest Enlightenment classifiers was John Ray, an ex-Cambridge scholar who relied on his friends’ generosity to fund his collecting trips through

156

I

Institutions

Europe and introduced some useful new words, such as ‘petals’ to replace ‘col¬ oured leaves’. An invalid sustained by crushed woodlice for his colic, Ray battled for thirty years to publish his massive plant compendium, and was finally forced to economize by omitting the illustrations. Struggling to reconcile conflicting opinions about category boundaries (when does a shrub become a tree?), Ray insisted on considering several characteristics simultaneously, arguing that it is impossible to penetrate beyond tangled impressions of a plant’s colour, smell, and feel to discern its internal essence. Ray suffered a fate similar to that of Chambers: although a classifying pioneer, he is less well known than his successor—Carl Linnaeus.The Swedish equivalent of Joseph Banks, Linnaeus made a couple of brief forays into the Arctic Circle, but then tried to organize the world from his own garden in Uppsala, a small university town. An expert self-publicist, Linnaeus had two major aims: to spread his plant classification system, which is still in widespread use; and to revive the national economy by producing luxuries at home. Just as Banks sat in London corresponding with botanists all over the world, so Linnaeus remained mainly in Sweden but sent out teams of apostles to bring back exotic specimens and preach his taxonomic gospel. To his opponents’ horror, Linnaeus drastically simplified the problem of classi¬ fying plants by choosing one single criterion—the number of reproductive organs. His new ‘Language of Flowers’ was, Linnaeus boasted, so straightforward that even women could understand it. In contrast with earlier schemes such as Ray’s, which demanded skilled qualitative comparisons, Linnean taxonomy claimed to be sim¬ ple and rational because it relied on counting. Linnaeus organized plants into twenty-four classes according to the number of male stamens in the flower. By taking account of the female pistils, he then subdivided each of these classes into less important orders, all numerically arranged. Linnaeus was formulating a supposedly scientific scheme, yet his text reads like a parody of a Mills and Boon novel: ‘The flowers’ leaves’, he gushed, ‘serve as bridal beds which the Creator has so gloriously arranged, adorned with such noble bed curtains, and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much the greater solemnity.’^ Although his system might seem objective, it was based on the preju¬ dices of Enlightenment Christian moralists. The fundamental Linnean division is between male and female—the same distinction as in the highly chauvinistic society of eighteenth-century Europe. By giving priority to male characteristics, Linnaeus imposed onto the plant kingdom the sexual discrimination that prevailed in the human world. His first level of ordering depends on the number of male stamens, whereas the subgroups are determined by the female pistils. Because this anthropomorphic way of dividing

Institutions

157

the plant kingdom appeared natural, even God-given, naturalists could then argue in reverse: since sexual hierarchies prevail in nature, male supremacy must also—so the distorted logic runs—be appropriate for people. This argument conveniently overlooks how this sexual ordering was inferred from society in the first place. Linnean classification not only mirrored social prejudice, but also reinforced it. Linnaeus is celebrated as a taxonomist, yet he was also a religious activist, a chauvinist economist who planned to rescue Sweden by using God’s laws of nature to boost the country’s flagging economy. On his interpretation of the Bible, shared by many of his contemporaries, human beings had a double divine mission—to look after the world, and to exploit it for their own benefit. For many people, maximizing profits took priority over expanding knowledge, and naturalists investigated plants not just out of scientific curios¬ ity, but also for finding ways of turning them into medicines, food, or shelter. Whereas some argued that God had scattered His riches around the Earth in order to encourage international trade, Linnaeus was convinced that God intended Sweden to prosper by growing everything it needed within its own borders. Analysed from a Eurocentric perspective, Linnaeus ruled an international botanical empire, sending out and receiving letters, people, and specimens while rem^aining m his central base. But from the perspective of Asian traders selling cof¬ fee, tea, and silk, his Swedish emissaries represented gullible customers willing to pay high prices. Other aspects of imperial development during the Enlightenment can be flipped round m a similar way. In British cities, coffee houses sprung up as new social centres enabling the development of a public voice—but they were also commercial ventures initiated by enterprising African and Asian migrants, and their popularity was enhanced by the massive amounts of sugar imported from plantations worked by subjugated slaves. On one interpretation, Britain grew rich by energetically seizing colonial possessions and exploiting their unsuspected riches; on another, eastern merchants in pre-existing networks self-protectively priced British trading companies out of the market, and so pushed them into establishing their own plantations. Britain’s commercial empire resembled not so much a wheel with London at its hub, but more an international network of local centres, each negotiating with those connected to it. The world was starting to be made uniform. As opportunistic growers transplanted crops to more profitable areas, the world began to resemble a single global garden. Banks sent breadfruit from Tahiti to the Caribbean, African slaves took rice to Carolina, European growers moved coffee production from Mocha to Java. While American slaves and African chiefs wore Indian cotton, Indians were growing chilli peppers, tomatoes, and other South American crops distributed by Portuguese and Spanish invaders. In Sweden, Linnaeus persuaded the government

158

Fig. 24

Institutions

‘Faces in profile from apes, ourangs, negroes, and other classes of people, up to the

antique.’ Pieter Camper, The Works of the late Professor Camper, on the Connexion between the Science of Anatomy and the Arts of Drawing, Painting, Statuary ...{ijgf).

to invest in his ambitious projects, promising northern rice paddies, cinnamon groves, and tea plantations. Linnaeus’s initial success in growing Europe’s first banana plant helped to win support for his futuristic visions, in which Sweden would enjoy home-grown luxuries that Britain and Fdolland imported from their foreign empires. Unfortunately for Sweden, Linnaeus’s agricultural dreams proved less durable than his taxonomy. Linnaeus’s system prevailed not because it was inherently right, but because, together with his disciples, he persuaded naturalists that it was the most conveni¬ ent. Although benefiting from powerful allies such as Banks, Linnaeus also faced forceful opponents. British gentlemen were scandalized by Linnaeus’s explicitly sexual vocabulary, especially as botany was the one science deemed appropriate for women. Although French botanists could cope with the sex, they believed that It was wrong to constrain nature into artificial categories, and criticized Linnaeus for ignoring many features of a plant to focus exclusively on its flower. Their most influential spokesman was Georges Buffon, a Newtonian mathemat¬ ician who was also director of the King’s gardens. Buffon’s 44-volume Histoire natureUe {Natural History) was the life-sciences equivalent of the Ency dope die, a

Institutions

159

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1, ^

massive, lavishly illustrated compendium of information about the Earth and Its inhabitants that was rapidly translated into English and admired all over Europe. Buffon went back to Aristotle and the Great Chain of Being, envisaging a continuous hierarchy progressing from the very lowest creatures up to complex animals and humans, and then stretching on through spiritual beings up to God. Most importantly, Buffon put history into natural history. Refusing to accept lit¬ erally the account given in the Bible, he expanded the Earth’s past, making some form of change and evolution seem possible. Whereas Linnaeus searched for the divine order that God had imposed during His brief six-day period of Creation, Buffon contemplated a universe that altered over time. Using Newtonian argu¬ ments, he portrayed the Earth as a gradually cooling globe that supported life first in the sea and then on land. Breaking with tradition, he classified plants not by their present appearance, but by their parental origins. Despite their differences, Buffon and Linnaeus both believed in European superiority. Although Linnaeus is heralded as the founder of modern taxonomy, his scientific convictions were rooted in his Christian faith. He regarded his

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i6o

Institutions

botanical garden as a miniature paradise, divided into four like the original Garden of Eden, and neatly laid out as if he were displaying God’s own clas¬ sification scheme. When Linnaeus extended his system to humans, he grouped them into four races to correspond with the four continents, the four quarters of Paradise, and the four humours governing human health. Linnaeus’s top people were the ingenious and sanguine white Europeans; the other three were the melancholy yellow Asians, the idle black Africans, and the happy-go-lucky Red Indians of America. One obvious blow to Linnaeus’s theory was the discovery of a fifth continent, Australia. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, European theories about race were transformed by encounters with other societies and by political debates about slavery. This meant that the fiercest debates were not about the number of races, but about two other related questions: Is there a definite, uncrossable boundary between humans and other primates? And are Europeans intrinsically better than other people? (And if so, in what order are black men and white women?) Abolitionists insisted that all human beings are created equal; to account for physical differences, they argued that people living in different places had gradually adapted to local climate conditions. In contrast, slave-owners tried to justify exploitation by arguing that white Europeans and black Africans were two separate species. Naturalists set out to resolve such issues by adopting a totally new classifica¬ tion scheme, one based not on personal judgment, but on careful measurements. This numerical approach would, they insisted, make the study of race scientific. Despite their claims of objectivity, these quantitative taxonomists brought sub¬ jective judgment right inside discussions about race. Pieter Camper, an eminent Dutch anatomist and anti-slavery campaigner, set out to confirm that there are only superficial differences between the inhabitants of different continents; yet his diagrams support European supremacy (Figure 24). By examining skulls. Camper measured the angle at which faces slope back. After some geometrical adjustments, he ranked them in a continuous line from apes on the left, through Africans and Asians, up to living Europeans and finishing with a statue of Apollo on the right. Although apparently mathematical, an impression reinforced by the grid lines, this scale is an aesthetic one, grading humans by their relative distance from two unrealizable extremes—the grotesque primate and the perfect Greek god.Through arbitrary geometric ranking. Camper stamped scientific credibility onto Aristotle’s great Cham of Being. Camper’s quantified classification scheme made racial prejudice scientif¬ ically respectable. Since then, many other human characteristics—brain size, for instance—have been measured to justify discrimination between races and sexes on the grounds of inherent physical differences. The Enlightenment is celebrated

Institutions

i6i

as the great Age of Classification, when science made sense of the world by organ¬ izing it into neat categories. But classifiers had differing priorities, and they could never agree on a perfect system. Like many other aspects of scientific knowledge, consensus was reached through negotiation—and the winning vote depended not only on who put forward the most compelling arguments, but also on who had the most powerful voice.

3

Careers

The Princess will build a hot greenhouse, 120 feet long, next spring at Kew, with a view to have exotics of the hottest climate, in which my pipes, to convey incessantly pure warm air, will probably be very serviceable...What a scene is here opened for improvement in green¬ house vegetation! —Stephen Hales, letter to John EUis (1758)

E

nglish gentlemen dissociated themselves from the sordid business of earn¬ ing money. Tt was not for gain,’ a rich aristocrat told Parliament, that

‘Newton...instructed and delighted the world; it would be unworthy of such men to traffic with a dirty bookseller.’^ Such high-sounding ideals were fine for those who could afford them, but for those with neither a generous patron nor wealthy parents, practising science entailed working out how to get paid. During the eighteenth century, scientific entrepreneurs—lecturers, publishers, writers, instrument-makers—devised ways of selling science for profit. Positive feedback set in.The more effectively sellers persuaded potential purchasers that science was useful, the more fashionable science became—and the more rapidly the number of customers increased. First in England, and later all over Europe and America, science expanded to become a public, commercial venture. For the long-term future of science, the most important Enlightenment inven¬ tion was not any particular instrument or theory, but the concept of a scientific career. Nowadays, children from any background can (in principle, anyway) follow a well-defined trajectory through school and university to acquire professional scientific qualifications and enjoy standard benefits—a steady income, an institu¬ tional laboratory or office, subscriptions to journals and societies. No such pat¬ tern existed in the eighteenth century, when enterprising philosophers started to experiment with their own lives and carve out possibilities for surviving through science. Some individuals did become rich. More significantly, they helped to create an intellectual elite that challenged the traditional aristocratic hierarchy. Similar changes were taking place throughout Enlightenment society, as writers, artists, and musicians struggled to establish profitable, professional positions.

Institutions

163

Existing structures changed only slowly, and older networks of power and priv¬ ilege still survived. For scientific innovators, being a Fellow of the Royal Society helped enormously Gradually, the Society became less of a gentlemen’s club and more of a serious research institution. Although it still included aristocrats and admirals, a growing number gained entry through achievement—members of the new middle classes who liked to class themselves as gentlemen, despite that demeaning need to work. Without the salaries awarded to their Parisian counter¬ parts, many of these scientific entrepreneurs decided to market their books and inventions. Taking advantage of the prestigious initials FRS, they gained patron¬ age and commercial contracts, using the Society to make money for themselves. Collectively, they made science important m society. The Royal Society engineered one of England’s first paid scientific posts—the directorship of the British Museum. Opening in 1759, this state-supported insti¬ tution displayed not only art objects and books, but also natural curiosities, such as shells, stuffed animals, minerals, and plants. The Fellows made sure that the job of running this public establishment went to one of their own—Gowin Knight, a successful social climber. A poor clergyman’s son, Knight was a physician and inventor who won a scholarship to Oxford and skilfully manoeuvred himself into the upper echelons of the Royal Society. Although criticized as a self-serving opportunist, Knight’s own bids for status helped to publicize the value of innov¬ ation. Not in himself a startlingly significant individual, Knight represents many other Enlightenment entrepreneurs whose combined activities of self-promotion were vital for science’s future. Knight’s life illustrates how practical innovations can matter more than ideas. His theories were turgid and convoluted—what counted were his inventions and self-marketing skills. London was the centre of the world’s instrument trade, and Knight introduced high-quality steel magnets that sold for a fine profit and brought precision measurement into experimental research. Proclaiming the importance to trade and empire of improving navigation, Knight gained still more status and money by persuading the British Navy to distribute his accurate, expensive compasses. In a typical manoeuvre of mutual advantage, this naval endorsement benefited him personally, but also enabled the Royal Society to boast that science was vital for British trade. Once in power at the British Museum, Knight moulded the public face of science by organizing displays and adopting Linnean methods of classification. Although more people were becoming interested in science, it only slowly became public rather than private. Access remained limited throughout the eight¬ eenth century. Reflecting the prejudices of his colleagues, Knight restricted entry to the British Museum, making it harder for women and workers to learn about the latest discoveries. Membership of the Royal Society was even more tightly

164

Institutions

controlled, and depended on personal recommendations. Although some instru¬ ment-makers did manage to get elected, the Fellows turned down other applica¬ tions from many other men who were scientifically knowledgeable but lacked the sycophantic skills of well-bred university graduates. One candidate who bore a lifelong grudge over his rejection was Benjamin Martin, an influential experimentalist who did much to advertise science by inventing instruments, writing introductory books, and touring round the coun¬ try giving lectures. Marketing pioneers like Martin were crucial for persuading middle-class people that science was important as well as interesting. Snooty satir¬ ists derided them as self-taught philosophers involved in dirty commerce, but despite their lack of formal education, these entrepreneurs changed the status of science in Britain by bringing it into everyday life. Figure 22 illustrates how per¬ formers captivated family audiences with orreries, air-pumps, and other devices that stimulated public demand for scientific novelty—and craftsmen responded by expanding the range of demonstration instruments they made for sale. Knowing about science became fashionable. The expensive equipment in Figure 20 is intended to display good taste, not to be used (a point sarcastically emphasized by the artist, who has shoved the globe under the table). To emphasize his cultural sophistication, this house-owner has decorated his wall with plaques of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton (on the left; those on the right are the poets John Milton and Alexander Pope). Public engagement affected how science developed. The Fellows of the Royal Society regarded themselves as an intellectual elite, privileged men whose sci¬ entific knowledge trickled down to the less-informed. In reality, the situation involved reciprocal interaction. Scientific customers wanted to be educated, but natural philosophers needed to convince potential purchasers that they had some¬ thing to sell worth buying. This meant directing their research towards generat¬ ing marketable products—not only theoretical explanations of how the Universe works, but also useful objects such as compasses that improved navigation, or theatrical orreries that educated their audiences at the same time as entertaining them. Rather than a one-way flow of information from top to bottom, producers and consumers were enmeshed in networks of mutual dependency. Competition was fierce.To entice audiences away trom conjurors and theatri¬ cal entertainers, scientific lecturers had to create spectacular performances. They soon realized that the most dramatic stage effects were generated by electricity, the scientific marketing success of the Enlightenment. As Martin enthused m one of his educational texts, electricity provided ‘an Entertainment for Angels, rather than for Men

Travelling lecturers held their audiences spellbound with glow¬

ing water jets, electrified insects, and glasses of spirits set aflame by the touch of a sword. Wealthy families bought their own apparatus, enabling aristocratic ladies to

Institutions

165

titillate admirers with electric kisses. At the Hanoverian court, electrical demon¬ strations replaced dancing, and at Versailles, a ruthless ringmaster entertained the King by making a chain of 180 shocked soldiers leap into the air. London dinner parties were enlivened by electrified cutlery, while Americans planned a feast of turkey roasted on an electric spit. The history of electricity is full of accidents. Overzealous experimenters suffered nosebleeds or even killed themselves, and the major discoveries were made unintentionally. Even the first electrical machine was an unanticipated by-product of Newton’s research into glass and air-pumps, when his assistant— Francis Hauksbee, a draper turned scientific demonstrator—found to his surprise that a rotating evacuated globe acquired an intriguing purple glow beneath his hands. Years later, a Dutch professor was playing around with a jar of water, a gun barrel, and a version of Hauksbee’s machine when he gave himself a massive shock—unwittingly, he had invented the Leyden jar, the first instrument to store static electricity. And at the end of the eighteenth century, an anatomist called Luigi Galvani happened to notice that a dead frog’s leg jerked in time with a nearby electrical machine, a chance discovery that—after being taken advantage of by much hard work—led to current electricity. Although electricity was invented inside London’s Royal Society, it became important outside because commercial entrepreneurs developed entertaining tricks and useful applications. After Hauksbee published his experiments in the Royal Society’s journal, a borrowed copy eventually reached Stephen Gray, a pro¬ vincial dyer who decided to go to London and make electricity his vocation. Figure 25 shows one version of his most dramatic feat—suspending a small elec¬ trified boy from his bedroom ceiling to attract brass filings with his hand. News of Gray’s home-based experiment spread rapidly. At first, interest was restricted to the networks of privileged natural philosophers linked with London’s Royal Society, but books and journals soon made electrical excitements available to wide audiences all over Europe and north-eastern America. The picture illustrates how the Society’s research projects were converted into profitable performances. On the right, one assistant turns the handle of an electrical machine, while another holds his hand on the revolving globe. With his left hand, the hanging boy electric¬ ally attracts feathers or small brass filings, while with the right, he communicates his charge to a second recruit, who is protected by an insulating stand. Sometimes girls were involved, adding a sexual tingle of attraction to electrical experiments and their paying spectators. Another way of promoting science was to make it useful. Optimists promised all sorts of electrical benefits—prolific hens, dryer weather, larger vegetables—but two inventions were particularly important: lightning rods and shock therapy, both endorsed by the political printer Benjamin Franklin. Franklin’s kite has become

i66

Institutions

Fig. 25

The hanging boy.

William Watson, Suite des experiences et observations^ pour server d Vexplication de la nature et des proprietes de I’electricite (1748).

the American equivalent of Newton s apple, a mythological story with Franklin cast as the intrepid investigator who braved a thunderstorm to hold an iron key that drew lightning down from the clouds (unlike some of his unfortunate imita¬ tors, Franklin prudently insulated his hand with a silk cloth). First in America, and later in Europe, churches, ships, and other tall constructions were—and still are— routinely protected by an iron rod to carry lightning safely into the ground. Unlike lightning rods, using electricity to treat illnesses now seems cruel and misguided. But at the time, Franklin and other eminent investigators recommended shocks for curing all sorts of ailments, ranging from flu and tooth¬ ache to insanity and paralysis. There was no established medical orthodoxy, and even the best-trained traditional physicians could do little to prevent pain or cure infections. Practitioners competed with each other for wealthy clients desperate for some sort of help—and many of them wrote affidavits testifying that electr¬ ical treatments worked. Nobody had yet officially identified the placebo effect, but electrical medicine was a profitable and respectable business at the end of the eighteenth century. Most of the electrical physicians were men, and most of their patients were women. One reason for this gender difference is that women were said to be more susceptible to electricity’s effects. More significantly, women were—along

Institutions

with artisans

167

second-class citizens not only in political affairs, but also in intel¬

lectual activities. In the drawing room of Figure 20, the father and his elder twin son are on the scientific side, allied with Bacon and Newton, while the mother and daughters are in the poetic realm, along with the younger twin boy building a fragile house of cards to indicate that chance has eliminated his inheritance. As science became fashionable, women were cast in the role of spectators, able to understand knowledge, but not allowed to create it. In one of Benjamin Martin’s most successful books, an Oxbridge student spends his vacations demonstrating experiments to his sister, condescendingly providing simple explanations while she enthuses about his brilliance. The subtext is clear: if even sisters and daughters can understand science, then their neighbours in the intellectual class system— poorly educated men—will also be able to follow the arguments. Learning from the example of Martin and other popularizing authors, towards the end of the eighteenth century some women broke with convention by decid¬ ing to write their own books and earn their own money. Abandoning Martin’s patronizing older brother, they created female authority figures, motherly governesses who gave their young pupils moral advice, gently guiding them towards the beauty and order of the natural world. Although women were excluded from universities and laboratories, they played a vital role in science’s development by making information about experimental research available to a far wider range of people than ever before. Some of their books became international bestsellers, influencing readers who went on to become professional scientists. For example, Michael Faraday became world-renowned for introducing electric fields; yet he always paid tribute to Jane Marcet, the author of the chemistry textbook— disguised as conversations between a mother and her children—that had first convinced him to go into science. Faraday is now remembered as the heroic founding father of the electrical industry, but his career as a salaried scientist could never have happened without the entrepre¬ neurial initiatives of the eighteenth century. In 1711, the fictional Mr Spectator had recommended public access to science, declaring that ‘1 shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in Coffee-Fiouses.’^ Traditional hierarchies were slow to break down, but a century later his dream had been partly realized. As a blacksmith’s son, Faraday had absolutely no prospect of going to university, but after reading Marcet’s chatty book, he engineered his way into science as the assistant of Flumphry Davy, celebrated chemist and President of London’s Royal Institution, which had been set up at the very end of the eighteenth century to encourage scientific research and education. After Davy died, Faraday himself became President—a romantic rags-to-riches story that Mr Spectator’s con¬ temporaries in the previous century could never have contemplated.

Institutions

i68

umn/tt?,:{i^

Fig. 26

Scientific Researches! — New Discoveries in Pneumaticks!—or—an Experimental Lecture of

the Powers of Air. Hand-coloured etching by James Gillray 1802.

Faraday was exceptional—entrenched prejudices died only slowly. Although he managed to escape his impoverished childhood and follow a scientific career, many privileged people both despised and feared upward mobility and equal opportunities. When the Royal Institution was first built in 1801, it had a discreet stone staircase enabling workers to enter separately and sit in the gallery away from their employers. This democratic stairway to higher education was soon demolished. As indicated by James Gillray’s caricature of Figure 26, audiences were restricted to affluent paying customers, derided here for their assiduous note¬ taking at London’s latest fashionable entertainment—chemistry experiments. However solidly established science might be today, two centuries ago its status was unclear. The lecturer brandishing the bellows is Humphry Davy, now cele¬ brated for discovering new elements and inventing the miner’s safety lamp, but then frequently vilified for importing French chemistry that threatened to blow up the establishment. Gillray’s scene satirizes a real event that went wrong, when a guinea pig from the audience so enjoyed the effects of laughing gas (nitrous oxide, only later used as an anaesthetic) that he refused to stop inhaling. On more suc¬ cessful occasions, Davy—a flamboyant performer—demonstrated that he could control the forces of nature with his chemical and electrical instruments. Working

Institutions

169

hard at self-promotion, Davy styled himself as an experimental genius and ended up as President of the prestigious Royal Society. Nevertheless, reservations about science persevered, and there was still no fixed identity for the men who practised it—the word ‘scientist’ had not yet been invented. In an expression reminiscent of Bacon’s desire to dominate the world by changing it, Davy boasted that experiments enabled a man ‘to interrogate nature with power, not simply as a scholar, passive and seeking only to understand her operations, but rather as a master, active with his own instruments’.^*^ But Davy also cautioned his audiences that ambitious scientific speculators might promise too much. It was a woman, Mary Shelley, who best captured some of these ambigu¬ ous attitudes. After immersing herself in Davy’s published Lectures, Shelley created Victor Frankenstein, a product of her imagination who represented the Janus faces of experimental science. Echoing Davy’s warnings, Shelley captivated her readers by articulating their own ambivalent feelings towards scientific research. Nowadays, Frankenstein is often interpreted as a prescient warning of science’s dangers, especially the atomic bomb. But Shelley was exposing the uncertain status of science in her own time. Although Knight, Martin, and countless other enterprising philosophers had sold science to the public, in the early nineteenth century many customers were still reluctant to buy.

4

Jndustries

I promise to pay to Dr. Darwin, of Lichfield, one thousand pounds upon his delivering to me (within two years from the date hereof) an Instrument called an organ that is capable of pronouncing the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed and Ten Commandments in the Vulgar Tongue, and his ceding to me, and me only, the property of the said invention with all the advantages thereto appertaining. —Matthew Boulton (3 September 1771)

B

y the 1830s, so many famous Britons had been buried in Westminster Abbey that space was running out. When the giant statue of James Watt was

levered into place, critics protested at its incongruous style, but they were easily outnumbered by hagiographers celebrating him as a modern Archimedes. While Archimedes’s ‘Eureka!’ moment had taken place in the bath,Watt was only a child when he watched the lid rise on a boiling kettle, an observation that (supposedly) inspired him to design steam engines for powering heavy machinery. According to the eulogists, Watt’s engine had not only made Britain the world’s leading industrial nation, whose cheap manufactured goods were benefiting the entire world, but also ensured her victory over France in the Napoleonic wars. The inscription on Watt’s Abbey monument—‘an original genius early exer¬ cised in philosophic research’—was a compromise.

Fashionable Londoners

found it hard to admit that the nation’s wealth stemmed from northern factory owners, and they looked down on business entrepreneurs who aimed to accu¬ mulate money rather than knowledge. Instead, they preferred to think of Watt as a born genius, the self-taught son of a Scottish shipbuilder who had risen through brains and dedication. Conversely, Watt’s manufacturing colleagues were concerned about the low status of engineers, and so they wanted to promote him as a serious scientific thinker. These opposed campaigners from contrasting social backgrounds eventually settled on a cross between an inspired engineer and a scholarly scientist. Watt became the hero of industrialization, celebrated for converting steam engines into money-making machines. But one man’s inventions, however

Institutions

171

important, do not in themselves explain why industrial change started far earlier in Britain than in the rest of Europe—around the middle of the eighteenth cen¬ tury. Part of the answer lies in the country’s rich natural resources. Enterprising developers benefited from local supplies of iron, coal, and wood, the essential raw materials needed for automating manufacturing and agricultural processes. Just as significantly, Britain profited from her imperial possessions and the global circula¬ tion of people, wealth, and goods, kept running with gold mined by slave labour in Africa. To satisfy their growing overseas markets, British manufacturers had to invent more efficient ways of converting cotton and metals—cheap imports from Africa and Asia—into fine cloths and luxurious ornaments for North Americans, who paid with plantation crops produced by enslaved Africans. Britain’s industrial wealth depended on oppressing not only the working classes at home, but also her colonial subjects around the world. Britain’s appearance was permanently altered in the eighteenth century. In the interests of large-scale efficiency, landowners abolished the traditional system of small personal allotments, replacing them with large open fields. To bring in raw materials and send out finished goods, factory owners commissioned cross¬ country canals and invested in large, paved roads. Displaced workers gravitated towards employment possibilities, so that for the first time, northern centres became larger and more important than provincial ports and cathedral cities in the south. Whereas wealth had previously depended on inheritance and agricul¬ ture, by the early nineteenth century, self-made industrialists were richer than many aristocrats. Victorian critics expressed their horror at belching chimneys, noisy trains, and dilapidated slums, castigating prosperous employers who ignored the dirt, sick¬ ness, and poverty they inflicted on their labourers. But the eighteenth-century entrepreneurs who first introduced new manufacturing techniques were unaware that their innovations would have such deleterious effects. Although their main aim was to increase their own profits, they did also believe in progress. Machines would, they claimed, not only improve their own positions but would also bring more opportunities to their workers and to the nation. Paternalistic landowners predicted that steam automation would benefit their employees by alleviating the drudgery of manual work. It is only with hindsight that their confidence seems naively optimistic, a self-justifying excuse for exploitation. During the early stages of industrialization, many writers and artists regarded bridges, canals, and mills as enhancing rather than despoiling the natural scenery. Their picturesque visions are epitomized by Figure 27, which shows the world’s first cast-iron bridge at Coalbrookdale.The valley’s coal and iron made it a natural choice for building refineries, whose produce could easily be shipped along the river Severn to the Atlantic port of Bristol. This scene is a paean to provincial

172

Institutions

Fig. 27 William Williams,

of/ro/76nW^e (1780).

progress, presenting the bridge as a wonder of the modern world and lauding iron as the versatile material of the future.The bridge’s artificial structure fits harmoni¬ ously within its naturally idyllic setting, the arch’s reflection exaggerated to form a circle, emblem of divine perfection. As the river meanders serenely through the gorge, its serpentine bends framed by gentle wooded slopes, the only indications of pollution are a few puffs of smoke. In contrast with this tranquillity, the iron works at Coalbrookdale also acquired an exotic grandeur that simultaneously appalled and thrilled. In art and litera¬ ture, Midlands factories were portrayed as awesome, sublime wonders—like ruined abbeys, they provided the British man-made equivalents of precipitous Alpine gorges or fiery Italian volcanoes.The home tourist industry blossomed as intrepid Londoners travelled northwards to admire the ambiguous fascination of Coalbrookdale. One southern visitor marvelled that ‘the noise of the forges, mills, &c. with all their vast machinery, the flames bursting from the furnaces with the burning of the coal and the smoak of the lime kilns, are altogether sublime and would unite well with craggy and bare rocks.’^“ Enlightenment Britain is often called the Age of Newton, a label that makes sense only if you include practical Newtonian machines alongside abstract Newtonian physics. Rationality and politeness may have prevailed at dinner par¬ ties, but this period was also marked by upheaval, dirt, and ingenuity. During the second half of the eighteenth century, while natural philosophers boasted about

Institutions

173

their orreries, electrical machines, and air-pumps, industrial researchers were advertising the far more useful and profitable products being generated from their own experiments—teapots, soap, jewellery, dyes. While London s Royal Society was making itself indispensable for the govern¬ ment s programme of imperial expansion, some of its Fellows also belonged to another important select brotherhood—the Lunar Society. Gathering together from all over the Midlands, the Lunar men met at each others’ homes once a month on the Monday of full moon, when their journeys home would be well lit over the unpaved roads. Founded in around 1750, this informal group had a floating membership with a central core of about a dozen close colleagues whose interests ranged over a wide range of topics, including geology, medicine, educa¬ tion, engines, electricity, chemistry, ballooning, botany, and silverware. No minutes of their meetings survive, but their letters reveal a fertile interchange of ideas between men who held very different interests but who were all committed to a single overriding goal—progress. In pledging themselves to progress, the Lunar men were not exceptional, but reflected a prevailing mood of optimism that Britons were learning more and behaving better, becoming healthier as well as wealthier. Sceptics objected that too much luxury inevitably resulted in degeneracy (after all, look what happened to the Roman Empire), but they were outweighed by enthusiastic economists who argued that industrialization would benefit purchasers as well as producers. In their view, prosperity was self-reinforcing—the richer you became, the harder you worked to earn even more money. And the same was true on a national scale, so that the country as a whole would be improved thanks to the efforts of profitseeking manufacturers. For the Lunar Society, progress also involved improving the way society was organized. When the chemist Joseph Priestley declared that ‘the English hier¬ archy... has equal reason to tremble even at an air pump, or an electrical machine’ he threatened that technical innovations had political implications—machines would alter for ever who owned the wealth and power.

Fired by utopian zeal,

these early industrialists promised that greater prosperity would be for the bene¬ fit of all, yet they seem to have been unconcerned about job satisfaction. The Edinburgh economist Adam Smith insisted that efficiency could be increased by dividing production up into successive stages, so that each worker was allocated a minute repetitive task rather than taking responsibility for creating a finished item. Following Smith’s advice, the pottery owner Josiah Wedgwood vowed ‘to make such Machines of the Men as cannot err’.^"^ The members of the Lunar Society met as equals but they are commemorated differently. Some of them have been set up as scientific founding fathers— Dr Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles and also a writer on evolution;

174

Institutions

Joseph Priestley, a self-taught clergyman who carried out chemical experiments on gases (and innocently sold his recipe for soda water to Mr Schweppes); Dr William Withering, who converted a wise woman’s herbal remedy into a potent heart medicine. As ‘an original genius early exercised in philosophic research’. Watt straddles the scientist—engineer boundary. In contrast, their colleagues who changed the country by promoting commercial enterprise—Josiah Wedgwood, James Keir, and Matthew Boulton—are classified as manufacturers, and so have been relegated to a low place on the scientific status scale. These divisions between science, technology, and commerce stem from the outdated snobbery of the rivals debating Watt’s inscription. Although Wedgwood, Keir, and Boulton can be described as provincial industrialists, this categorization glosses over the fact that they were also elected Fellows of London’s Royal Society. Wedgwood might be a commercial opportunist who advertised himself as ‘VaseMaker to the Universe’, but he was also a meticulous experimenter who outpaced his rivals by systematically analysing clays, minerals, and pigments, recording the results in his secret laboratory notebooks. As the Royal Society appreciated, even though Wedgwood had originally developed his high-temperature thermometer to monitor kilns, it was valuable for a great range of scientific investigations. Keir built up a personal fortune from his soap factories, but he was an international expert on crystals whose lucrative contribution to national health and hygiene depended on detailed chemical investigations. United by their enthusiasm and drive for improvement, the Lunar men had a major impact on British life. Boulton, a Birmingham factory owner, shared the Baconian ideals professed by the Royal Society—he explained to the Scottish writer James Boswell that ‘I sell here. Sir, what all the world desires to have— Power.’Steam powered Boulton’s machines, which were themselves engineer¬ ing shifts in social power. The Lunar men’s new-found prosperity enabled them to challenge traditional hierarchies by marrying into the aristocracy, buying up land, and building luxurious houses for themselves as well as cheap accommoda¬ tion for their workers.They campaigned for a democratic educational system that would make intelligence, not birth, the route to success. Darwin and some of the other members even sponsored better education for girls (although they assumed that the men would remain m charge). In his Chemical Dictionary, Keir aimed to make information freely available so that his readers could make up their own minds. He wanted ‘the public of all nations and of all times, to decide with a full knowledge of the question’—chemistry should be for the people, not reserved for a privileged elite. Reinforcing these promises of equality, manufacturers persuaded their custom¬ ers that they could buy similar products to those owned by their betters. Or to express their advertising tactics in modern jargon, they promised upward mobility

Institutions

175

through purchasing material goods. Consumer societies are based on the assump¬ tion that commodities are what make life worthwhile, and this new approach to happiness through ownership was initiated by the great marketing innovators of the eighteenth century. Wedgwood was a superb potter, but his biggest coup was to create desire, to convince customers that it made sense to replace serviceable china with his latest designs

and then to repeat the upgrade a few years later. By

lowering his prices, Wedgwood constantly expanded the number of purchasers willing to work harder so they would have enough money to buy cheap imita¬ tions of aristocratic china. Despite their democratic claims, the Lunar Society still believed that some men (them, for example) should be more privileged than others. Similarly, although they often relied on their wives’ contributions to their businesses, there was no serious consideration that women should be made equal partners. Darwin cele¬ brated automation in a long florid poem, adding extensive footnotes crammed with technical details to celebrate the innovations of his Lunar colleagues, but he omitted workers and women. This is part of Darwin’s lyrical tribute to innov¬ ations in the cotton industry: Slow, with soft lips, the whirling Can acquires The tender skeins, and wraps in rising spires

Then fly the spoles, the rapid axles glow, And slowly circumvolves the labouring wheel below.

In Darwin’s hymn to machinery, the revolving machines resemble the harmon¬ ious planetary movements described by Newton. But it is the wheel that works. The native human labourers and the colonial slaves are glossed over, unmentioned. Darwin simply ignores the devastating effects of mechanization on skilled spinners and weavers—women as well as men—who were being replaced by a single male supervisor in charge of one machine. The factory owners who promised finer products repeatedly moaned that their workers were unreliable, uncooperative, and failed to replicate the perfection of automated equipment. When riots broke out. Watt and Wedgwood invoked the marvels of modernization, but seemed to forget their own impoverished backgrounds.They showed little sympathy for the underlying causes of unrest—hunger, long hours, unemployment. The early industrialists were committed to progress, but by the mid¬ nineteenth century, reformers were campaigning for different improvements. Whereas Darwin had conveniently forgotten about the women and the workers, a new generation of writers were exposing the appalling conditions in factory slums. In 1842, when a trainee textile manager ventured into a lower-class district in Manchester, he discovered that ‘the atmosphere is...laden and darkened by the

176

Institutions

smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys. A horde of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles.’His name was Friedrich Engels, co-author with Karl Marx of The Communist Manifesto. Looking back to the mid-eighteenth century, Engels explained that Britain had experienced an industrial transformation whose true significance was only beginning to be understood. If he had been able to peer forwards, he might have been surprised by the revolutionary impact gf his own work, which historians are now in their turn struggling to understand.

5

T^olutions

The most radical revolutionary w^ill become a conservative on the day after the revolution. —Hannah Arendt, The NewYorker (1970)

T

he French Revolution transformed the course of history—and it also changed how history was itself conceived. In year III of the French Revolutionary

Republic (1794), a Parisian industrial spy returned from a secret reconnaissance mission into British factories to report ‘that a revolution in the mechanical arts, the real precursor, the true and principal cause of political revolutions was developing in a manner frightening to the whole of Europe’.In delivering this rousing message about industrial transformation, the spy gave ‘revolution’ its latest fash¬ ionable sense—instead of the cyclical movement of the planets around the Earth, he was referring to an abrupt, irreversible change of any kind. Since the French Revolution, many historians—political, economic, scientific—-have adopted this revolutionary metaphor, constructing the past as a series of dramatic ruptures. In analysing science’s past, the Chemical Revolution often features as one of these sudden transitions. It seems doubly special because it coincided (well, more or less) with the American and French Revolutions, and its main protagonist, Antoine Eavoisier, announced at the time that he was a revolutionary. Eike a political agitator, Lavoisier planned his tactics carefully, secretly recording how he intended to revolu¬ tionize science. At last, in 1789, the year the French Revolution erupted, he pubhshed a book announcing that he had overturned the old-fashioned chemical theories of Joseph Priestley and his English colleagues. Figure 28 illustrates this heroic version of Lavoisier, here gazing up at his wife. Mane Paulze, as though she were his scientific muse while he corrects the proofs of his textbook, his chenucal manifesto in which he introduced new chemical names and symbols sinular to those in use today. The instruments prominently displayed on the table are for producing oxygen, while those shimmering at his feet emphasize the importance of precise measurements. Meticulously painted, they symbolize Lavoisier’s victory over his English rival. Verbal equivalents of this picture are similarly dramatic, demoting Priestley into a naive blunderer who believed in an imaginary substance called phlogiston.

178

Institutions

Fig. 28

Marie Paulze and her husband Antoine Lavoisier, by Jacques-Louis David (1788).

and elevating Lavoisier into an incisive, methodical genius who discovered oxygen and eradicated ridiculous old-fashioned concepts. Originally introduced in German mines (no coincidence that the Nazis destroyed Lavoisier’s statue), phlogiston was widely used to explain burning and metal refining. Despite all the mockery, in some circumstances, the theory worked well. When ores (oxides in modern terminology) are heated with charcoal, they absorb phlogiston and turn into metals; when metals are heated, they release their phlogiston (visible as a blue shine on the surface) and turn back into ore. Problems started when chemists introduced more accurate balances, making it hard to explain why met¬ als should gain weight when they are heated and release phlogiston—surely they should weigh less?

Institutions

179

Lavoisier’s innovation was to turn the process round, to suggest that metals absorb oxygen while ores release it. After heating some powdered mercury ore by focusing sunlight with a lens, Lavoisier collected the gas given off, tested it to eliminate other possibilities, and then invented a new name for it—oxygen. But...there are several objections to this dramatic account of his victory over Priestley. For one thing, both chemists isolated the same gas, but—like historians analysing the past—they interpreted it differently. And Priestley got there first— what Lavoisier christened‘oxygen’, Priestley had already labelled‘dephlogisticated air’. Phlogiston’s major source was dirty charcoal, and Priestley associated it with impurity, priding himself on having produced a refined air with marvellous lifesustaining properties (he had no qualms about timing how long it would take a mouse to suffocate in various gases). Even Lavoisier himself thought that his revolution was about far more than identifying oxygen. He aimed to reform the whole of chemistry. A conscientious tax collector and lawyer, Lavoisier insisted on reason and order, balancing the two sides of an equation as though he were reconciling his accounts, and emphasiz¬ ing the importance of precise measurement. To accompany France’s new math¬ ematical language of algebra, Lavoisier introduced a logical chemical vocabulary. Traditionally, substances had been referred to by vernacular names based on their source or their properties, but Lavoisier substituted Latinate labels that could (he claimed) be understood all over the world. Epsom salts, for instance, went inter¬ national as magnesium sulphate. British experimenters resisted Lavoisier’s recommendations not because they were reactionary chauvinists, but because they favoured a different style of research. Priestley appreciated the value of unanticipated observations, and so he criticized Lavoisier for systematically planning every step in advance, thus making it impos¬ sible to learn from results along the way In France as well as in Britain, Lavoisier’s opponents accused him of leaping ahead too quickly, of proceeding deductively from a few facts to general conclusions, and relying too strongly on complicated instruments that might be introducing errors of their own. From their perspective, Lavoisier was setting himself up as a privileged expert who depended on expen¬ sive apparatus and used sophisticated words unfamiliar to people who worked with chemicals every day—apothecaries prescribing Epsom salts as a laxative, or artisans making soap and glass from ordinary soda (sodium carbonate under the new regime). In France, Lavoisier became an icon of revolutionary chemistry not because he was indubitably right, but because he persuaded influential people that he was. Together with his wife, he waged an extensive publicity campaign, producing books and lectures, plays and pictures to defeat the opposition and promote his own ideas. After Lavoisier was guillotined by the Jacobins for his financial dealings.

i8o

Institutions

his followers, who had been unable (or unwilling) to save him, ensured their own futures by arguing that his new chemistry was vital for enabling France to lead the world. They celebrated Lavoisier as a revolutionary hero, even staging a mock funeral that attracted three thousand mourners. Like Galileo, Lavoisier became a mythological martyr to science, the iconic figurehead depicted in Figure 28, a dedicated chemist whose revolutionary science bore little relationship to practical concerns. But that is not the only way of portraying Lavoisier. For example, the portfolio in the back left of this double portrait conceals his wife’s drawings, which show Lavoisier not as a lone genius, but as the director of a collaborative laboratory team in which Paulze herself plays a vital role. From the Jacobins’ point of view, Lavoiser was a wealthy landowner who exploited the poor—which is why they imprisoned and executed him. In contrast, his friends esteemed Lavoisier as a rad¬ ical reformer so committed to improving the conditions of farmers and factory workers that he poured his own money into overhauling agricultural and manu¬ facturing methods. And when historians look back, some represent Lavoisier as a practical innovator who improved Paris’s street lighting and water supply, while others accuse him of being a dogmatic theoretician who, by modern standards, made curious mistakes—calling light and heat chemical elements, or declaring that oxygen is an essential component of all acids (a common exception is hydro¬ chloric acid). Heroic stories credit Lavoisier with single-handedly creating modern chemis¬ try. More realistic versions depict him as one amongst many who gradually trans¬ formed alchemy and other skilled crafts into the scientific discipline of chemistry by inheriting and modifying their predecessors’ techniques. These transitions are symbolized in Figure 29, which shows a laboratory in Kingston (near London) designed specifically for chemical research around the middle of the eighteenth century. The drawings on the wall—piped water on the left, a glasshouse in the alcove—emphasize that chemistry was important because it was useful. The lefthand side is dominated by furnaces, developed by alchemists and used for refin¬ ing metals—the mining context in which phlogiston originated. Ranged on the upper shelf and the central desk with its specimen drawers are instruments stem¬ ming from alchemy, chemistry’s experimental origins. Moving across the picture to the window, the researcher has set up mechanical equipment, including delicate balances to test his products’ purity. They indicate how in England as well as on the Continent, precision measurement had long been essential for gold assaying, drug dispensing, and other crafts that predated scientific chemistry. Throughout the eighteenth century, chemistry was a practical rather than a theoretical subject. Chemists gradually differentiated themselves from alchemists by rejecting arcane speculation and emphasizing the usefulness of their art (yes.

Institutions

i8i

Fig. 29 A chemical laboratory in early eighteenth-century London. Frontispiece ofWilliam Lewis, Commercium philosophico-technicum or the philosophical commerce of the arts (1765).

art not science—implying technical expertise, in contrast with scholarly learning). Benefiting from alchemical techniques and instruments developed over centuries, they concentrated on producing functional products—dyes, medicines, fertilizers, bleaches, cement, coal gas. In England, Keir,Wedgwood, and other manufacturing entrepreneurs used their chemical research to develop new industrial processes and run profitable businesses. Across the Channel, there was more state funding, which during the Revolutionary period was directed towards military require¬ ments. Lavoisier was in charge of Paris’s gunpowder factory, responsible for pro¬ ducing artificially the basic ingredients that could no longer be imported because of the political situation. Chemists introduced new theories after, not before, their search for practical applications. For instance, sulphuric acid had long been known to alchemists, but now started to be manufactured in bulk for industrial use, even though nobody could explain how the acid was being made or why it was so effective. In itself, the discovery of oxygen/dephlogisticated air was not immediately seen as momen¬ tous, because it was part of a collective search for gases from around the middle of the eighteenth century Even the idea that ordinary air might be a mixture of other substances, not an element in its own right, originated as a by-product of the search for drugs to dissolve kidney stones. The discovery arose unexpectedly

i82

Institutions

through a Priestley-like style of research, when a Scottish student called Joseph Black ignored his professors’ instructions, and decided to investigate some strange discrepancies revealed by careful weighing. With no end result in mind. Black pursued the directions indicated by his experimental results to conclude that fixed air (carbon dioxide) is trapped inside some salts, but can be released by acids or heat. By the end of the eighteenth century, chemistry was becoming an independ¬ ent science. Although chemists were still using traditional techniques developed by alchemists, artisans, and apothecaries, they were starting to gain prestige and become recognized by official organizations such as the Royal Society. But their new status did not come automatically—they had to work for it. Gillray’s carica¬ ture (Figure 26) mocked not only Davy himself, but also the presumptuousness of chemical experimenters. Tainted by its alchemical origins, its practical uses in industrial processes, and its links with the French Revolution, chemistry was regarded as inferior to natural philosophy. To make it respectable, and on a par with other sciences, Davy had to divest chemistry of these associations and lever himself into a position of authority. Davy succeeded by discarding the democratic approach towards science favoured by Priestley and the Lunar chemists, instead converting himself into a Lavoisier-like figure, an expert who controlled powerful equipment. To achieve this transformation, Davy made himself indispensable to both the Royal Society and the Royal Institution. He also adopted a new instrument invented in Italy by Alessandro Volta (whose name survives in ‘voltage’), an early form of electric bat¬ tery that enabled Davy to break down water and to isolate new elements, such as sodium and potassium. For Davy,Volta’s battery was not only a miraculous source of energy, but also ‘a key which promises to lay open some of the most mysterious recesses of nature’.By controlling his large, impressive apparatus to produce dra¬ matic effects, Davy convinced his audiences that he was the ideal person to wield that key. In the scientific chemistry of the nineteenth century, spectators watched while specialists performed—only they had the authority to create and dispense scientific knowledge. So—to summarize the Chemical Revolution: it took place ...well, when did it? Was it in 1789, when Lavoisier published his new chemical creed? But many years went by before it was generally accepted—and anyway, some of it now seems wrong.The key event was...well, what was it? Lavoisier’s identification of oxy¬ gen, Priestley’s isolation of the same gas. Black’s discovery of fixed air, or Davy’s analysis of water? Such questions have more realistic but less exciting answers—no individual was uniquely responsible, there was no key moment, change took place gradually.The more you try to pin down the Chemical Revolution, the more elu¬ sive it becomes. The more information you take into account, the less significant

Institutions

183

any particular episode begins to seem. The more closely you analyse its hero, the less exceptional his behaviour appears. As scientific revolutions go, the Chemical Revolution seems less significant than three others—the Scientific, Industrial, and Darwinian Revolutions. These now sound so familiar that they seem to be real episodes with precise beginnings and ends, but—as chemistry illustrates—scientific revolutions have such nebulous definitions that historians are now writing them out of existence. One objection is their length. The most famous, the Scientific Revolution, is generally said to have lasted from around

1550

of the Universe) to

(a nice round date shortly following Newton’s Principia).

1700

(just after Copernicus placed the Sun at the centre

Similarly, although Charles Darwin has a Revolution named after him, evolution¬ ary ideas were common even in his grandfather’s time, and it was not until the 1930S

that a fully fledged and rather different Darwinian theory was formulated.

Another problem is that not everything changes at once. Accounts of the Scientific Revolution (which has not featured in this book) focus on cosmology, ignore continuities in other areas such as chemistry, and imagine science (what¬ ever that might be) operating in a cultural vacuum, unaffected by trade, politics, or social transformations. In any case, how far-reaching does a shift have to be before it counts as a Revolution? Albert Einstein claimed to revolutionize physics with his relativity theory, but many scientific disciplines (to say nothing of ordinary life) continue to operate with Newtonian mechanics. Harvey reformed physiology by showing that blood circulates, but he was also a committed Aristotelian who had little immediate impact on medical practices—traditional blood-letting continued to be a standard remedy. Breaking the past down into revolutions does have advantages.They dramatize history, and they provide convenient signposts to major trends of the past. Most importantly, propagandists create revolutions retrospectively in order to distinguish themselves from a preceding and supposedly inferior period.Victorian economists emphasized the Industrial Revolution because they wanted to establish a defini¬ tive break between their own progressive era and the country’s feudal origins. The Scientific Revolution started dominating accounts of the past only after the Second World War, when historians optimistically (and unrealistically) predicted that science would provide a universal, secular faith to unite the world. The concept of revolutionary change has philosophical as well as historical implications. Many people regard scientific knowledge as Absolute Truth

they

assume that science is cumulative and progressive, resembling a relay race or a climbing expedition m which scientists inherit the achievements of their prede¬ cessors to advance steadily onwards. In revolutionary models, on the other hand, science changes sporadically with abrupt shifts, and previous knowledge is dismissed, not incorporated as stepping-stones towards the present. An apt analogy

184

Institutions

is a branching evolutionary tree, a process with no predetermined end in which old schools of thought are jettisoned when younger researchers head off in new directions. The main proponent of such theories was Thomas Kuhn, an American physi¬ cist and philosopher, whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions pro¬ foundly affected perceptions of science. Since Kuhn enterprisingly straddled academic disciplines, critics found his suggestions easy to attack. Philosophers liked the history but picked holes in the theories, whereas historians faulted him for simplifying facts. Kuhn’s original ideas have been so drastically revised that no unreconstructed Kuhnians survive—even Kuhn himself renounced some of his early opinions. Nevertheless, his name symbolizes current views that science lurches unpredictably, a fallible human endeavour swayed like any other by local influences, personal interests, and political pressures. Revolutions in science may or may not have happened—it all depends on how you want to think about the past. Max Planck, Germany’s leading scientist in the early twentieth century, insisted that change happens slowly, not in sudden flashes:"An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually win¬ ning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarised with the ideas from the beginning.’"^ Similarly, histor¬ ical truths also come and go with different generations. Revolutions are currently out of fashion for academics, even though it is hard for them to relinquish such a convenient and familiar way of structuring the past.

The Church welcomes technological progress and receives it with love, for it is an indubitable fact that technological progress comes from God and, therefore, can and must lead to Him. —Pope Pius XII, Christmas Message (1953)

E

benezer Scrooge, Mr Gradgrind, Mr Micawber...the novelist Charles Dickens invented many characters who were, like their real-life contempor¬

aries, obsessed with balance sheets, numbers, and arithmetic. Facts and figures dominated Victorian life—which is why the British government continued to pour money into the engineering dream of Charles Babbage, a Cambridge pro¬ fessor now celebrated as a great computer pioneer. In 1837 Babbage optimistic¬ ally started designing an analytical engine, a massive machine of metal cogs that would take over the tedious work of human calculators by churning out reams of mathematical tables accurate to several decimal places, although he was to never complete a fully working model. Babbage had started campaigning for quantification when he was a rebel¬ lious undergraduate protesting against his lecturers’ old-fashioned curriculum. Cambridge was, complained Babbage and his friends, lagging sadly behind its Continental competitors, and they wanted to bring English physics up-to-date by introducing the French mathematical approach based on Leibniz’s calculus. Making science mathematical might now seem like an obvious step towards modernity, but in the early nineteenth century, British men of science rejected French algebra, which dealt in abstract symbols rather than in tangible objects solidly tied to observations. Babbage’s student circle also urged their professors to stop accepting the Bible’s accounts as hteral truths. Instead, they favoured deism, which maintains (broadly speak¬ ing) that the Universe operates independently of God, and so can be studied rationally without relying on His written revelations. Paris’s leading theoretician, Pierre-Simon Laplace, had already gone still further, ehminatmg God altogether. Napoleon, who enthusiastically backed scientific research, asked Laplace why God was absent from his cosmos;‘Sire,’ replied Laplace (allegedly, anyway),‘I have no need of that hypothesis.’

i86

Institutions

Laplace liked to call himself‘the French Newton’, but Newton himself would not have recognized Laplace’s arid, force-driven Universe in which atoms whirl along predetermined paths with no divine guidance. Under Laplace’s influence, French research flourished in the early nineteenth century during Napoleon’s rule, later regarded by Babbage and hisVictorian colleagues as a golden era for sci¬ entific achievement. Benefiting from state funding and a technologically oriented education system, a powerful group of researchers clustered around Laplace to establish a new mathematical style of physics. Modelling the Universe with equa¬ tions, they systematically quantified science by making mathematics and measure¬ ment centrally important to physics and chemistry. Rationalization originated not in Laplace’s research school, but in earlier calls for social change. Even before the Revolution, while the King was still on the throne, philosophical politicians proclaimed that reason was the key to progress. They wanted to reform government by applying to France the same laws that God had devised to control nature. Just as the cosmos acted in an orderly fashion following Newtonian gravity, so too, society would advance harmoniously after similar rules had been found to describe human behaviour. Political campaigners did, of course, recognize that individual emotions and personal interests make it far harder to derive precise laws for people than for planets. To compensate for this inevitable fuzziness, mathematically minded reformers introduced probabil¬ ity into decision-making. Instead of relying on an individual fallible judge or an eccentric monarch, they wanted verdicts and policies to be determined collect¬ ively, and they devised formulae to calculate the risks and likelihoods involved in accepting the judgement of a majority when unanimity could not be reached. Solving such legal and administrative questions demanded new theories of prob¬ ability—and these theories were later adapted to cope with scientific problems. Laplace introduced probability into physics, assessing the relative degree of plaus¬ ibility he could assign to different assumptions, and estimating the errors associated with his results. This national drive for rationality intensified in France during the 1790s. As revolutionaries divested the country of its monarchy and aristocratic institutions, they set out to reorganize daily life on democratic, rational principles. Changes were introduced by committees, regarded as ideologically preferable to individuals, although still subject to the influence of key players such as Laplace. Propaganda posters from this period show happy, well-nourished citizens measuring out cloth, wine, and wood with the new metric system, based on decimal logic. Under this short-lived regime, time was rationalized by introducing ten-day weeks divided into ten months—and clocks whose faces have ten hours, each of a hundred minutes, have survived. The committees also decimalized space, sweeping away arbitrary imperial measurements (such as gallons, pounds, and acres), and replacing

Institutions

187

them with metric units (litres, grams, hectares) based objectively on the size of the Earth. In principle, a metre was one ten-millionth of the quarter-arc from the North Pole to the equator, and this provided the essential reference for the entire metric system.The new dimensions were determined (unfortunately, rather inaccurately) by two astronomers, who set out on a hazardous seven-year exped¬ ition to measure a long section of longitude through France and Spain. On their return, a platinum metre was set up in Paris—slightly shorter than it should have been, but still a political symbol of the country’s rational approach to the natural world. Although France became more efficient through being unified, in some ways the Revolution substituted one set of rulers for another. Despite the Revolutionary rhetoric of equality, the metric system reintroduced central control by an elite group—the flip-side of unification is uniformity. Previously, different regions of France had used their own measurement methods, but when Parisian bureau¬ crats introduced their rational system, they eliminated local variations and placed the entire country under a single metropolitan regime. France’s unique calendar and measurements not only isolated the nation from the rest of the world, but also antagonized its inhabitants. Workers objected to the longer working week imposed by the reformed calendar, Christians were horrified by the abolition of Sundays, and shoppers accused opportunistic merchants of making extra profits by fiddling the translated prices. In year XIV of the new system, Napoleon reinstated the conventional date of 1806, along with familiar units, and it was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that Europe eventually went metric. Other rationalizing reforms also had double-edged effects. For example, the nation’s health was dramatically improved by building state-subsidized hospitals that treated loyal citizens free of charge. The big, airy wards had only one patient per bed, and infections were further reduced by chemical disinfectants. By grouping patients together, doctors could time the course of an illness, record symptoms, and compare numerically the effects of various treatments. In these enlightened clinics, medical men would accumulate observations to build up expertise, acquir¬ ing a penetrative gaze that enabled them to see through surface symptoms and discern the underlying reality. On the other hand, efficient methods of diagnosis and therapy tended to reduce the amount of sympathetic one-on-one care that had formerly characterized medical treatment—patients started to become num¬ bered cases of named diseases rather than individuals with unique imbalances m their personal humours. Professional doctors were rigorously trained and exam¬ ined, but they squeezed out traditional practitioners, such as village herbalists and midwives, so that expertise became increasingly restricted to an affluent tier of male university graduates. When physicians are elevated into all-seemg experts, their pronouncements are hard to overturn.

i88

Institutions

Similarly, the state-organized educational system claimed to be democratic, but in practice remained open mainly to the privileged. Even before the Revolution, military colleges provided teaching far more mathematically oriented than that in England. Committed to technological improvement, successive governments poured funds into engineering academies, which generated highly trained men (yes, men) who brought a rational vision to many areas—architecture, communi¬ cation systems, scientific research, machinery. Examinations were based .on math¬ ematical ability, which was held to provide an objective and hence democratic measure of aptitude. But high levels of skill were time-consuming and expensive to acquire, and so could effectively only be attained by students from rich families. By the early nineteenth century, the old hereditary aristocracy had been replaced by a new elite based on wealth and intelligence. Some of these talented and mathematically trained engineering graduates were attracted to the research group run by Laplace and his close friend Claude Berthollet, a physician and chemist who conveniently lived next door in Arcueil (just outside Paris), which became the centre of Napoleonic science. Although educated before the Revolution, both men had taught in technical colleges, both were involved in Lavoisier’s projects of chemical reform, and both believed that the underlying forces of nature stem from the powerful bonds between minute particles. Well-established themselves, they were able to sway selection committees and channel funds towards their own preferred acolytes—patron¬ age remained as important under the new regime as it had been for centuries. Together, Laplace and Berthollet assembled a gifted team of disciples who rap¬ idly extended and consolidated Laplace’s mathematical approach by applying it to other phenomena. But after a few years, the reservations of outsiders turned first into challenges and then into refutations, and the Laplacian programme was abruptly abandoned. Laplace was a forceful man in several senses. He imposed his own ideas on his followers, he moulded his models of nature to conform with his preconceived views, and he envisaged the world in terms of short-range forces. His genius was, remarked an English sceptic, like a sledgehammer that smashed open mathemat¬ ical puzzles but ‘gave neither finish nor beauty to the results’.One of Laplace’s first achievements was to make Newtonianism more perfect than Newton’s own original version. Newton himself thought that, unless God intervened occasion¬ ally, the gravitational interactions between the planets would eventually make the entire system unstable. Deploying some nifty mathematics, Laplace showed that Newton had been wrong—which was why, to Napoleon’s consternation, he was able to dispense with God. From then on, Laplace fashioned his results to fit his reworked brand of Newtonianism. He wanted to vindicate what he had inherited, rather than launch his own original scheme.

Institutions

189

In the Laplacian cosmos, forces rule. Molecules attract and repel each other, and—provided you know where everything started—you can calculate where each molecule will be in the future.This is a deterministic model, in which behav¬ iour is implacably governed by abstract forces and can be predicted mathemat¬ ically. According to Laplace’s version of Newtonianism, ordinary matter—metal, bone, salt

is held together by attractive forces acting over very short distances

between tiny particles. In addition to these ordinary molecules, special ones make up weightless invisible fluids, such as light, heat, and electricity. Inside these aetherial substances, nearby particles mutually repel one another, although they are attracted to ordinary ones. Building on these basic concepts, Laplace aimed to formulate a sophisticated mathematical structure that would unite the whole of terrestrial physics. Laplace worked on an impressive range of topics in physics and chemistry, and he ensured that the top jobs went to researchers who vindicated his own ideas. One outstanding example is optics. Over-ruling the objections raised by his crit¬ ics, Newton had insisted that light is not a wave resembling sound, but a stream of tiny corpuscles. Laplace steered one of his most brilliant students, Etienne Malus, towards examining Iceland spar, an unusual crystal that produces double images when you look through it. As anticipated, Malus managed to confirm Laplace’s Newtonian opinion by devising a mathematical, corpuscular explanation. Yet even while Malus was triumphantly confirming Arcueil’s glory, experimenters in other centres beyond Laplace’s direct control were rebelling against his strangle¬ hold. From around 1815, the alternative view of light started to take over, when Augustin Fresnel used his experiments on diffraction to expose shortcomings in Malus’s work and demonstrate that—contrary to Newton—light is carried by waves. As Fresnel won over converts in the closely knit Parisian scientific community, even Laplace was no longer able to persuade committees that his own candidates should prevail. And once the Laplacian view of light had been discredited, attacks mounted in other areas—heat, electromagnetism, chemistry. By 1825, French scientific power was no longer based in Arcueil. Laplace’s circle disintegrated, but his mark on the future of science was indelible. Later m the nineteenth century, the metric system he had sponsored was revived, and the world’s international bureau for establishing standard measurements was established m France. Nevertheless, Laplace’s opponents continued to influence the pattern of French research, and they rejected his bold, hypothetical approach to focus instead on meticulous observation. France gradually ceased to lead the world in theoretical physics. In contrast, the campaign launched by Babbage and his Cambridge colleagues proved successful, so that although British scientists abandoned Laplace’s model of short-range forces, they did adopt his mathemat¬ ical approach. Ironically, they also developed his work on probability theory to

190

Institutions

yield a new type of physics based on statistics and chance events—Laplace’s care¬ ful assessments of experimental evidence eventually undermined his own totally predictable cosmos. The rise and fall of Pierre-Simon Laplace depended not only on his theories, but also on the manoeuvres of his allies and enemies. Like any other human activity, scientific practices are affected by ambition, complacency, and opportun¬ ism. Seeking preeminence and fast results, Laplace dominated his own colleagues, manipulated scientific committees to promote his disciples, and took advan¬ tage of France’s administrative centralization to ensure that his doctrines were perpetuated in textbooks and examination syllabuses. Outside Arcueil, beyond his direct control, Laplace’s critics deployed equivalent tactics to consolidate his defeat—editing influential journals, lobbying during scientific elections, securing major teaching positions. The fate of this single individual is less significant than his long-term impact, since his rational, mathematical approach was adopted by British and German physicists during the nineteenth century and still permeates science today.

7

disciplines

Why is England a great nation? Is it because her sons are brave? No, for so are the savage denizens of Polynesia; She is great because their brav¬ ery is fortified by discipline, and discipline is the offshoot of Science. —William Grove, On the Progress of the Physical Sciences (1842)

C I I very savage can dance,’ declared Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. J—iHis antagonist’s riposte now seems odd—‘I doubt not that you are an adept in the science yourself, Mr Darcy.’^^ ‘Science’ is among the most slippery words in the English language, because although it has been in use for hundreds of years, its meanings constantly shift and are impossible to pin down. That plural (meanings) was deliberate. In the early nineteenth century, when Austen casually mentioned the science of dancing, other writers were still using ‘science’ for the mediaeval subjects of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Long afterwards,‘science’ could still mean any scholarly discipline, because the modern distinction between the Arts and the Sciences had not yet solidified. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin listed five subjects he thought worthwhile studying at university—the Sciences of Morals, History, Grammar, Music, and Painting—none of which feature on modern sci¬ entific syllabuses. All of them, Ruskin declared, were more intellectually demand¬ ing than chemistry, electricity, or geology. However skilfully Mr Darcy performed his science of dancing, Austen could never have called him a scientist. That word, now so common, was not even invented until twenty years later, in 1833, when the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) was holding its third annual meeting. As the conference delegates joked about needing an umbrella term to cover their diverse interests, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected ‘philosopher’, and William Whewell—one of Babbage’s allies, a Cambridge mathematical astronomer— suggested ‘scientist’ instead. The new word was very slow to catch on. Many Victorians insisted on keep¬ ing older expressions, such as ‘man of science’, or ‘naturalist’, or ‘experimental philosopher’. Even men now seen as the nineteenth century’s most eminent

192

Institutions

scientists—Darwin, Faraday, Lord Kelvin—refused to use the new term for describing themselves. Why, they demanded, should anyone bother to invent such an ugly word when perfectly adequate expressions already existed? Mistakenly, critics accused ‘scientist’ of being an American import, a trans-Atlantic neolo¬ gism—one eminent geologist declared it was better to die ‘than bestialise our tongue by such barbarisms’."^The debate was still raging sixty years after Whewell first introduced the idea, and it was only in the early twentieth century that ‘sci¬ entist’ was fully accepted. In America, the new word was immediately adopted. But in Britain, antag¬ onism festered for decades. Ironically, part of the problem was that experimenters like Davy had been almost too successful in establishing themselves as experts. Although they were profoundly knowledgeable about their own disciplines, they found it increasingly difficult to keep up with the latest developments in other areas. Whewell thought that expertise entailed narrowness—he was worried that as specialists burrowed deeper and deeper, they would lose sight of science’s over¬ all unity and fail to communicate with each other effectively. Reflecting nostalgic¬ ally on a vanished era when individual polymaths could cover the whole gamut of natural knowledge, Whewell urged researchers to club together and retain the integrity of the scientific community. By identifying themselves as scientists, he urged, they could distinguish themselves from artists, writers, and musicians, who were also struggling to negotiate a high-status identity. Money was a contentious issue in these debates. Supporters of the new word argued that if individuals grouped together as scientists, they would gain lobbying power for persuading the government or large commercial companies to finance their research projects, which were becoming more ambitious and expensive. On the other hand, well-connected gentlemen liked to regard themselves as members of an elite group who were pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Even those who had been born neither rich nor aristocratic affected to regard earning one’s liv¬ ing as a rather sordid way of proceeding, and they looked down with disdain on entrepreneurs who turned their scientific activities into commercial ventures. The nineteenth-century arguments about ‘scientist’ were so virulent because far more was at stake than the word itself The new label signalled changes in class, money, and status—long-term social transformations that the privileged classes found hard to accept. In a sense, the gentlemanly men of science became victims of their own success, because it was partly through their own efforts that science became more democratic. Keen to advertise the benefits of their activities, they ensured that scientific knowledge became available to a far larger sector of the population, and slowly ceased to be the preserve of privileged gentlemen. As research grew, and education expanded, new opportunities for paid employment as laboratory assistants, museum curators, or astronomical calculators arose. Very

Institutions

193

gradually, science became a paid profession open to many, rather than an allabsorbing but expensive occupation for the leisured classes. Eventually, it became a compliment rather than a sneer to call someone a scientist. The single term ‘science’ bracketed together disciplines that had very differ¬ ent pasts. Some subjects—astronomy, optics, mechanics—stemmed directly from mediaeval university syllabuses: although they slowly changed over the centuries, their roots can be clearly seen stretching back over time. In contrast, although chemistry was a new science, its origins lay not in abstruse scholarly studies, but in everyday practices such as alchemy, medicine, and skilled crafts. Similarly, the word ‘biology’ was only invented in the early nineteenth century, but the new speciality inherited a good deal of accurate knowledge from herbalists, merchants, and col¬ lectors (women as well as men). Not all the new sciences had such ancient lineages. One freshly minted discipline was geology, whose birth was marked in 1807 by the foundation of Britain’s first specialized scientific society. Geologists’ desire to study the Earth’s structure for its own sake, rather than for some practical gain, was relatively recent. Before then, various groups of people had accumulated their own specialized knowledge—miners who knew how to detect and identify ores, surveyors who picked out the best routes for roads, farmers who knew which crops to grow on different soils, soldiers who mapped the terrain of areas they hoped to conquer (the Ordnance Survey started in Scotland, not England, because the army wanted to repress the Jacobite rebels). It was only in the early nineteenth century that geological collecting became a fashionable craze for the middle classes, who spent many happy hours tapping rocks with their hammers to chip off mineral specimens and fossils, often freshly revealed by the cuttings made for canals and railways. But geology also became a serious science, whose challenge to the Bible’s version of Creation stimulated theories of evolution. The discipline that dominated mneteenth-century science—electromagnetism —was also a new one. Although electricity and magnetism are now inseparably tied together, they used to be completely distinct from each other. For one thing, as powers of nature, they behaved very differently—electricity flashed and hurt, whereas magnetism operated invisibly, affecting iron but leaving people unscathed. In addition, their sciences contrasted strongly. Electricity was an excit¬ ing eighteenth-century innovation, advertised by experimental philosophers who captured public attention with their spectacular performances. Magnetism, on the other hand, was one of nature’s traditional mysteries, a God-given power tapped by navigators but largely ignored by natural philosophers. Although a few did conscientiously try to make sense of its vagaries, compasses and iron filings could hardly compete with the fascination of sparks and charges.

194

Institutions

The symbolic year of change is 1820, when Hans Oersted, a physics professor in Copenhagen, contrived a dramatic demonstration to impress his students—as he passed a current through a wire, a small magnetic needle twitched in response. All over Europe, researchers set about investigating this effect, and Humphry Davy—by then President of the Royal Institution—asked his assistant, Michael Faraday, to report on progress. Within a few months, Faraday had devised a small and deceptively simple instrument that definitively linked together electricity and magnetism. Moreover, he showed them to be symmetrical powers: he could make a magnet move because of a current, but he could also make an electric wire rotate around a magnet. A new scientific discipline—electromagnetism—was forged by bringing together the electrical inventions of Enlightenment philosophers and the centuries-old magnetic expertise of mariners. ‘Scientist’ was an umbrella term, but not everybody was allowed to shelter beneath it. Hungry for prestige, scientists wanted the authority to declare that they were incontrovertibly right, that the knowledge they produced in their laboratories was irrefutably correct. New specializations were being invented, but not all of them were deemed worthy to be labelled science. Science was splintering into disciplines—but disciplining means controlling as well as teaching. Like police guards patrolling national borders, scientists decreed which topics should lie inside the large domain they ruled over, and which ones should be outlawed. In retrospect, their verdicts seem straightforward, but at the time, they were not always clear-cut. Chemistry became a major scientific discipline, yet Gillray’s caricature (Figure 26) illustrates how chemists were initially disparaged because of their links with alchemy, industry, and the French Revolution. Conversely, prac¬ tices now widely condemned as rubbish at one time had many supporters who claimed they were legitimate sciences. In principle, determining whether these sciences were valid should have been a rational process of assessing how well they worked. But that was not necessarily the case—prejudice, prestige, and politics were often involved. Take mesmerism, or animal magnetism, a medical therapy that flourished intermittently throughout the nineteenth century. The system was originally introduced in the 1780s by Franz Mesmer, who claimed to cure sick people by redirecting magnetic fluid through their bodies. Although his rivals denounced him as a quack, Mesmer made a quick fortune when he set up his clinic in Paris. Wealthy aristocrats, many of them women, flocked for treatment not only because mesmerism was fashionable, but also because it seemed to work. Figure 30 shows patients clustering round an oval wooden tub stuffed with iron filings, magnets, and other special ingredients. As Mesmer conducts operations from the right with his magnetic baton, the lame man on the left is tying his leg to an iron hoop to suck up the tub’s magnetic fluid, while the woman collapsed in a chair has

Institutions

195

Fig. 30 A salon in Franz Mesmer’s magnetic clinic. Undated engraving by H.Thiriat.

swooned into a crisis, a controversial side effect induced by Mesmer’s close prox¬ imity, intense gaze, and suggestive hand movements. Critics accused him of sexual impropriety, but he produced impressive affidavits from grateful clients testifying to his therapeutic success. Animal magnetism had respectable antecedents. Mesmer, a fully qualified Viennese physician, gained a doctorate for his theories, which he had derived from Newtonian gravity. Fiis techniques originated from wearing special magnets next to the skin, a medical therapy that had recently been enthusiastically recommended by an official French committee. Mesmer’s nebulous magnetic fluid circulating through the atmosphere might sound bizarre, but it was conceptually no stranger than the electrical aethers being endorsed by Europe’s top natural philosophers. And most importantly as far as his patients were concerned, Mesmer’s soothing regimen helped to alleviate their symptoms—which is why they went on paying his high fees. Mesmer appeared dangerous not because he was dramatically different from other physicians, but because he was similar enough to represent a real threat. Nowadays mesmerism might be classed as alternative medicine, but two hundred years ago there was no such either/or situation. Even the most highly trained physicians often had little hope to offer, and desperate patients were willing to buy whatever help they could to alleviate the symptoms of incurable conditions.

196

Institutions

As they struggled for prestige, eminent doctors derided their less-educated com¬ petitors as charlatans, even though they themselves marketed useless nostrums at exorbitant prices. Physicians were spread out along a continuous spectrum of qualifications. At one end lay the high society doctors who had been to university, belonged to professional associations, and charged large fees; at the other were untrained men and women trying to scrape a living by caring for the poor. In between, all sorts of practitioners catered for different illnesses and budgets—sur¬ geons, apothecaries, herbalists, midwives. Making science authoritative entailed imposing firm boundaries between establishment and quack medicine, between orthodox and pseudo-science. In the absence of abstract criteria for distinguishing between them, the decisions were often taken on social grounds. Mesmer’s competitors became very worried. Often unable to provide effective treatment themselves, they watched him taking over their wealthiest patients. Soon, splinter groups were mushrooming all over France. Because relatively uneducated men could be trained as mesmerists, magnetic medicine became linked with rad¬ ical politics, and so threatened the position of traditional physicians. Castigating Mesmer as a quack was one way to get rid of him, and a royal committee was set up to justify his exclusion. After a series of investigations, they pronounced sentence—he was to be banned. Tellingly, they acknowledged that his treatments worked, but castigated him for being unable to provide any rational explanation. The committee attributed mesmeric cures to the power of imagination, a psycho¬ somatic effect they rejected because it could not be accounted for rationally. Along with alchemy, astrology, and many other practices, mesmerism was even¬ tually banished from legitimate science and—despite being a traditionally edu¬ cated physician—Mesmer was branded a charlatan. Even so, mesmeric societies flourished m the nineteenth century, partly because it was a democratic therapy that could be practised by ordinary people. This had revolutionary implications— magnetizers exerted power over their patients, so what would happen if control passed out of the hands of the privileged classes? Still worse, because Mesmer affected his patients’ physical health by influencing their imaginations, he chal¬ lenged the supremacy of reason. This was a frightening prospect, since the ideology of scientific detachment insisted that rational men of science could use their minds to discipline their bod¬ ies. Disciplinary science was to be based on reason and order, on logic and explanation.The eighteenth century is often called the Age of Reason, and Enlightenment philosophers bequeathed this passion for rationality to the scientists who followed them. Trained as experts, and organized into specialized disciplines, the goal of nineteenth-century scientists was to unify and discipline the world by finding simple laws that described the behaviour of everything—people as well as things, minds as well as bodies.

V aws C

ommitted to progress, nineteenth-century scientists searched for laws to govern the human as well as the physical worlds. Establishing themselves as

experts, they gradually gained prestige, wresting authority from religious leaders to create a new scientific priesthood. Yet however much scientists presen ted themselves as stalwart warriors of reason, theological attitudes continued to pervade debates about life and the Universe, with no sudden switch from biblical faith to scientific conviction. Scientists claimed to obtain Absolute Truth by recording the world as objective observers, but this view was challenged by German Romantic philosophers who stressed a unified cosmos in which human beings are integrated within the natural wo rid. Although ultimately less influential than the champions of detached precision and mathematical laws, their approach resonates with modern environ¬ mental attitudes. Personal judgements kept creeping back into supposedly neutral science. Although instruments were designed to eliminate human error, their use inevitably entailed subjective assessments. Even the most famous innovation of the century—Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection—was no logical analysis, but depended on accumulating corroborative evidence rather than providing incontrovertible proof Instead of spreading uniformly around the globe, science varied geographically, developing through local processes of adaptation and exchange. In principle, international scientific collaboration transcended political differences; yet standardizing time was fraught with conflict—although it did give rise to relativity, an esoteric theory rooted in practical concerns of improving telegraph systems.

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God made man in His own image, but the Public is made by Newspapers. —Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby (1844)

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ne sunny autumn day in 1858, a distinguished clique of scientific, religious, and political dignitaries headed a procession through the streets of Grantham,

a small English provincial town. Accompanied by a military band, the octogenar¬ ian Henry Brougham—Scottish Baron and eminent judge—climbed up onto a dais decorated in the colours of the rainbow and sat down in a battered armchair with its stuffing showing. This deliberately unrestored relic had once belonged to Isaac Newton, a local hero now elevated to national grandeur. Brougham was about to unveil a statue of Newton forged from a Russian cannon captured during the Crimean War and donated by Queen Victoria herself. Erecting Newton’s statue was such a momentous event that it hit the national press—Figure 31 was reproduced in several journals. Although sculptures ofmonarchs, saints, and military leaders abounded all over Europe, commemorating a scientific figurehead was something new. The carefully orchestrated ceremony at Grantham indicates how the status of science had risen during the first half of the nineteenth century, when Newton became acclaimed as an English genius, the scientific counterpart ofWilliam Shakespeare. Funded by donations from all over the country, Newton’s massive monument is an early example of Britain’s heritage industry, intended by scientists to rouse public enthusiasm for science and stimulate funding opportunities. This sculpture not only imagines what Newton might have looked like, but also represents an idealized form of how Victorian physicists thought they should behave. Admired for his single-minded dedication, Newton epitomized the methodical scientist, the steadfast logical searcher for Absolute Truth. Dressed in formal university robes, this authoritarian figure is pointing at a planetary dia¬ gram, emblem of his three laws of motion and the mathematical order he had imparted to the Universe. ‘Search for laws!’—Faraday’s summary of a lecture he

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STATUE OF SIR ISAAC NEWTON, INAUGURATED LAST WEEK AT GRANTHAM.

Fig.

31

Isaac Newton’s statue at Grantham, sculpted by William Theed (1858).

Illustrated London News, 2 Oct. 1858.

gave at the Royal Institution—was a leitmotif of nineteenth-century science. The major goal of Victorian physicists was to explain the world in mathematical laws, to unite its disparate branches—heat, light, mechanics, electricity—into one single system. Similarly, scientists in other fields wanted to adopt this law-based approach for describing how societies behave, how the Earth’s landscape has changed, how

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living organisms function. Just as God governs through moral laws, or rulers maintain discipline through state legislation, so Newton had imposed regularity on the cosmos by deciphering the laws of nature—a mathematical triumph that Victorian scientists aspired to emulate. Standing in front of Newton’s statue. Brougham formulated his own scientific law

his Law of Gradual Progress’. Like many Victorians, Brougham believed

that hard work was the key to success, and he preached the virtues of stead¬ ily building up knowledge step by tiny step. Newton’s sober bronze figure epit¬ omized the rewards of dedication (and it inspired Margaret Thatcher, Grantham’s other famous workaholic, on her daily walk to school).To inspire his listeners with faith in science’s potential. Brougham eloquently outlined a progressive overview of human history. Newton had, he explained, inherited the achievements of his predecessors, and by steadfastly applying his genius from an early age had been able to reach further, extending the bounds of theoretical knowledge and—-just as importantly—paving the way for steam engines, source of the nation’s industrial supremacy. By building on Newton’s legacy, declared Brougham, scientists would lead Britain forwards to a magnificent future. Progress was a major refrain of nineteenth-century science. Campaigners fore¬ cast advance on many fronts—new laws would be formulated, unexplored parts of the globe would be surveyed and brought under control, machines would become bigger, better, and faster, the general level of education would imp rove... the promises multiplied. Significantly, by the 1830s, scientific theories themselves encapsulated the notion of progress, contradicting the traditional view that God created the Universe as it is now. Geologists described an Earth that had gradually cooled from its original fluid state, astronomers suggested that the Solar System had condensed out of swirling clouds, and early evolutionists dared to propose that present-day plants and animals had not always existed. Brougham was a veteran scientific campaigner and also an astute politician. Throughout his life, he sketched out utopian schemes for making scientific know¬ ledge available to even the poorest cottagers.When the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) began publishing cheap scientific books. Brougham wrote an enthusiastic introduction that sold over thirty thousand copies—a huge number at the time. But his was not a plea for equal opportunities. Rather than prompting workers to demand a university education. Brougham hoped that they would improve their performance if they understood their tasks better. The SDUK might sound like a philanthropic organization, but its organizers acted like scientific missionaries with a hidden agenda. Even the name they chose reveals their feelings of superiority, implying that a core elite sent down to the working classes predigested information that was not necessarily intellectually demanding, but would help them carry out their work more efficiently (and so generate more profit for their employers). By convincing labourers that progress

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32 William Heath [Paul Pry], The March of Intellect (1829).

came through science, the privileged classes hoped to reduce the risk of political protests about low wages and poor working conditions. As one radical writer quipped, Brougham wanted all Englishmen to read Bacon, whereas what they needed was bacon on their dinner plates. Many people not only disapproved of Brougham’s plans to educate the workers, but also disagreed with his optimistic views about scientific progress. ‘Lord how this world improves as we grow older’ was the satirical heading of a caricature labelled The March of Intellect, a common catchphrase of the time (Figure 32).This panorama displays devices which appear absurd yet refer to contemporary engin¬ eering projects. George Stephenson’s Rocket was just being launched, and early train passengers were terrified by the speed at which ‘Steam Horses’ (lower right) raced through the countryside. The central vignette shows passengers boarding at Greenwich for their vacuum-propelled flight to Bengal—but less than twenty years later, similar propulsion tubes were in service on several railway lines. Steam power was making manufactured goods cheaper, but it also threatened existing hierarchies. By fantasizing about steam razors and airships, this artist poked fun at privileged critics who questioned the value of technological innovations, insisting that convenience would inevitably result in moral decadence and Intel-

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lectual deterioration. After all, if the labouring masses could afford education, travel, and luxuries, then perhaps they would neglect their duties? Wealthy aristocrats feared that their power was being eroded and passing into the hands of self-made men, the industrial investors who were making rapid fortunes—hence the Latin sign ‘God regards only pure hands, not full ones’ above the Royal Patent Boot Cleaning Engine on the bottom right. Several scenes show workers behaving inappropriately. The owner of the boot cleaner loUs against the wall reading a French newspaper, while a dustman and his scruffy companion gorge themselves on exotic foods, scan¬ dalously ignoring an elegant lady sheltering beneath her black servant’s umbrella. Despite the satires, steam power had a dramatic impact on scientific progress. Fast trains and ships effectively shrunk the world, so that knowledge and people, specimens and instruments, could be transported more rapidly than ever before. Just as importantly, steam revolutionized publishing. Cheap books and journals meant that for the first time, wide sectors of the population could read about science. As production processes became increasingly mechanized, paper prices tumbled and printing was vastly speeded up. By the 1830s, publishers had realized that it made good marketing sense to increase profits by selling large numbers at low prices, an opportunity that had never existed previously—no coincidence that this was when the SDUK and its competitors started to flourish. Because of cheap printing, when Brougham made his Newtonian speech eulogizing scientific progress, he knew that he was addressing the entire country. Souvenir pamphlets sold out the same day, newspapers printed summaries of his lecture, and engravings of Newton’s magisterial statue enabled it to reach far beyond the confines of Grantham. These new publicity opportunities enabled scientists to promote themselves more efficiently, and so sway public opinion in favour of investing m their exploratory voyages and research projects. At the same time, as the March of Intellect caricature illustrates, their critics also became more visible. Instead of being restricted to a privileged minority, debates about science and its impact started to be conducted publicly. These unprecedented media possibilities transformed science. One particul¬ arly influential organization was the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), which took advantage of cheap publishing to advertise science, aiming to increase the number of people involved in it. Founded m 1831, the BAAS encouraged researchers to speed up progress by sharing their findings at provincial meetings held once a year in different parts of the country. Backing William Whewell, who recognized the advantages of forming a scientific commu¬ nity, they urged experimenters to join forces as scientists, arguing that this would enable them to exert more leverage than when split into separate disciplines, and also provide the protection they needed in the absence of professional support structures.

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Men who embarked on a life of science had no set path to follow, but were forced to carve out their own career routes. Lacking the job security associ¬ ated with modern professional science, even some eminent men found money a perpetual problem. Thomas Huxley, for instance, is now famous for promoting Darwin’s theory of evolution, but he constantly struggled financially. Many scientists worked at home. Darwin is the most famous example, but the Cambridge physicist Lord Rayleigh apparently cleared his scientific apparatus from-the top of the piano every day to make way for family prayers. Even within universities, professors struggled to obtain minimal facilities—after Lord Kelvin converted a disused wine cellar into a laboratory, it was constantly permeated with coal dust from the adjacent store. It was only towards the end of the century, follow¬ ing many individuals’ hardship and enterprise, that school leavers could aspire to become salaried professional scientists. As well as this practical incentive to act collectively, nineteenth-century scientists were also theoretically inspired to cooperate. They believed that the sciences are interconnected, so that progress towards Ultimate Truth can only be made by drawing on a range of insights, not by depending on inherently limited advances in individual specialities. They believed that there was only one way to find the unifying mathematical laws that governed the whole of nature—search¬ ing systematically. Whatever their discipline, scientists claimed to share a common scientific method that characterized their unique approach to the world and dis¬ tinguished them from non-scientists. But making themselves special created problems. On the one hand, scientists were trying to consolidate their status by publicizing their achievements—they wanted to disseminate their ideas, improve scientific education, enlist recruits. Aware of the new power available through cheap publishing, they produced a wide range of books and magazine articles to promote their activities amongst wider and wider audiences. But at the same time, the leaders of the BAAS were privileged men who doubted whether everybody was capable of understanding the profundity of their scientific thought. Could one really expect lower class men (to say nothing of women) to follow the rigorous mental demands of the scientific method? Perversely, by insisting on their unique abilities, scientists made it impos¬ sible for everyone to share equally in the scientific endeavour. This intellectual class system placed workers and women at the bottom of the scientific hierarchy. Even at the supposedly welcoming BAAS meetings, wives and daughters were relegated to the light-hearted evening talks. Elite Victorians prided themselves on progress, but were reluctant to acknowledge that achiev¬ ing it meant depending on people excluded from the higher echelons of sci¬ ence. Many less privileged groups did make vital contributions, but they have been rendered almost invisible. Most obviously, countless technical assistants were

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concealed behind the scenes, less-educated men essential for building apparatus, organizing laboratories, and repeatedly running experiments. Similarly, eminent scientists rarely credited the editing, drawing, and collecting skills of their wives, who were often carefully picked out as potential collaborators. Mary Lyell, for instance, was an ideal scientific bride. The daughter of a rich and famous scientist (perfect for an ambitious son-in-law), she became the unacknowledged intellec¬ tual partner of her husband, the geologist Charles Lyell. Before their marriage, she agreed to learn German and so save him the bother. Subsequently, she accompan¬ ied him on a geological field trip for their honeymoon, edited and illustrated his books, organized his mineral collection, and became an expert on shell classifica¬ tion, even training her maid to kill and clean snails. Although scientists set themselves up as experts, knowledge did not simply diffuse downwards from elite organizations. Instead, change often stemmed from interactions between diverse groups, and on exchanges of information rather than one-way flows. For example, some exceptionally significant fossils were dug out not by specialized London geologists, but by provincial residents who made a living through selling local finds. The most famous was Mary Anning of Lyme Regis, who was only a young girl when she discovered her first dinosaurs on the English seashore. Later, she set up a business selling fossils to rich scientists, who were baffled by these skeletons that differed so much from any living species. Many of them have ended up in museums (mostly without her name on), but although Anning’s discoveries transformed geology by providing hard evidence of extinction, she never published and so failed to gain formal recognition. Instead, she became somewhat of a collectors’ item herself, a provincial curiosity to be marvelled at by London visitors. Specialists in other disciplines relied on similar networks, whose diverse par¬ ticipants excelled m different ways—the scientific experts did not always know best. Around Manchester, groups of weavers set up informal Botanical Societies which met in village pubs. Although not always literate, the weavers took their studies seriously, fining members who turned up drunk and carefully comparing their specimens with textbook illustrations to learn their Latin names. Scouring the local hillsides, they became extremely knowledgeable about plant distribution. Eminent botanists relied on these artisan collectors, who could gather and identify rare flowers which they would have been incapable of locating themselves. Another way in which science relied on non-professionals was through mass publishing, which transformed the ways in which women could participate. Previously, canny authors had tried to increase sales by targeting women as poten¬ tial purchasers, but during the nineteenth century, women started to write the books themselves. The most striking example is Mary Somerville, a mathematical physicist of such astounding ability that, despite the disadvantage of being unable

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to study at university, she carried out research original enough to be published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Even so, since she was banned from entering, her husband had to read the paper for her, although the Fellows did install her bust in the entrance hall. Like other gifted women, although excluded from scientific laboratories and scholarly societies, Somerville had a profound influence on science through her writing. Recruited by Brougham to popularize Laplace s book on astronomy, she instead produced an expert’s text, one that explained to mathematically chal¬ lenged British scientists the complex calculations essential for grasping Laplace’s innovations. Although her next major book was less specialized, it addressed a central theme of nineteenth-century physics—linking together apparently dispar¬ ate phenomena. Familiar with a wide range of authors, Somerville not only synthesized, but also provided a fresh interpretation that influenced later debates on light and electromagnetism. Elite scientists were impressed, general readers could cope after she introduced some diagrams, and Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834) became a scientific classic that did much to consolidate the public reputation of Victorian physics. By choosing unification, Somerville wrote on precisely the topic that inspired the BAAS—especially Whewell, whose new word ‘scientist’ made its first printed appearance in his enthusiastic review of her book.

globalization

Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything. —Charles Kuralt, On the Road (1980)

A

fter Christopher Columbus set off for India but landed in the Bahamas, Europeans were forced to recognize the existence of another great

land-mass. Keen to maintain the separation of the Old World from the New, they imagined a north-south line running down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Three hundred years later, a German Columbus called Alexander von Humboldt spent five years exploring Latin America, and he decided to slice the globe in a different direction—across the equator. Claiming to be more interested m climate than in history, Humboldt planned to use systematic measurements for founding a new terrestrial physics that would unite the entire globe. In one sense, science was already global. Natural historians had long taken advantage of international trading connections and personal friendships to exchange specimens, so that plants, animals, and minerals travelled around the world in many directions. The new sciences of botany and geology depended on these global interchanges, which increased during the nineteenth century as nations expanded their empires and commercial networks. Information was also being transferred from one place to another, not just in books but also in activities—manufacturing processes, medical treatments, agricultural techniques. Merchants, emigrants, and colonial occupiers integrated their own customs with local expertise, so that knowledge was not adopted wholesale, but was trans¬ formed and assimilated before being exported to other countries. For instance, European engineers designing irrigation systems incorporated methods that had been developed in the Nile valley over centuries, while colonial doctors in the tropics tested traditional remedies to formulate powerful, portable drugs. In addition, a new type of global science emerged. Scientists started to regard the globe as an entity to be analysed in its own right, so that the world itself became a laboratory. European explorers began to investigate natural phenom¬ ena where they occurred, in real time, rather than taking samples back home to

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examine them later. Humboldt, a pioneer of this field-based approach, declared himself to be a terrestrial physicist who operated very differently from naturalists. Instead of merely collecting and describing, he declared, his goal was to ana¬ lyse—by building up massive data sets of precise measurements, he would derive scientific laws describing the entire globe. Linking East with West, Humboldt pictured climatic bands circling the Earth on either side of the equator, each with its own typical vegetation, landscape, and human society. A skilled self-promoter, Humboldt took advantage of the expanding media industry to publicize his travels. Sober German scientists relegated his romanticized adventures to children’s literature, but elsewhere he came to epitomize the enter¬ prising adventurer who braves mountains, rivers, and diseases to chart the globe scientifically. As well as promoting terrestrial field sciences, Humboldt also engaged in activities often regarded as lying outside scientific territory, such as stimulating European investment and encouraging independence movements. For Central and South Americans, Humboldt became a hero not for his global physics, but for con¬ vincing Europeans that their countries mattered. Unlike most modern scientists, Humboldt was independently wealthy and had no professional brief to fulfill. As a relatively free agent, he chose to spend huge amounts of money and time on amassing accurate measurements, but he also garnered opinions from indigenous Indians and political revolutionaries. After learning how Peruvian farmers used guano, he transformed the local economy and also glorified himself by converting this traditional fertilizer into a scientific discovery that would benefit Europeans. Armed with impressive arrays of accurate instruments, Humboldt demon¬ strated that accumulating meticulous measurements could reveal patterns in nature’s vagaries, and so impose mathematical order on variable phenomena such as air pressure, magnetism, and plant distribution. Figure 33 shows his visual argu¬ ment that there must be general laws describing how temperature varies across the Earth’s surface. Humboldt’s chart stretches from the east coast of America on the left over to Asia on the right, and it illustrates a new and crucially important statistical approach to nature. Instead of plotting actual temperatures on any par¬ ticular day, Humboldt calculated the annual mean temperature for each place, thus amalgamating many thousands of observations into a few curved lines, called isotherms. By averaging out fluctuations, Humboldt ordained and displayed global regularity. Humboldt was a visual innovator. Although it now seems obvious that dia¬ grams enable scientists, advertisers, and politicians to summarize evidence and present it persuasively (if not always fairly), Figure 33 is an extremely early example. In the first half of the nineteenth century, graphs, bar charts, and so forth were only just being introduced, and they were slow to catch on. Scientists trying to

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Fig. 33 Alexander von Humboldt’s ‘Chart of isothermal lines'. Annales de chimie et de physique 5 (1817).

interpret diagrammatic data had to learn a new visual language—just like read¬ ing, deciphering graphs and maps only becomes automatic with practice. Even contour lines, which directly represent actual mountain heights, seemed alien and were not routinely used until the early twentieth century. Humboldt’s isotherms involved yet a further conceptual leap, because they were idealized summaries with no physical reality. By recording averages as lines, Humboldt made statis¬ tical regularities visible, short-circuiting masses of detailed numerical readings to present scientific relationships at a glance. This impetus to think and understand through diagrams was encouraged by new printing techniques, which made it possible to reproduce images cheaply and also to incorporate them within the text rather than binding in separate sheets of paper. Gradually, ingenious visualizing techniques became important in many scientific disciplines. Faraday, for example, knew little mathematics but was an inspired threedimensional visualizer who developed the concept of electromagnetic fields by imagining lines of force extending out through space with a quasi-real existence. Geology’s great visual innovator was Darwin’s friend Charles Lyell, who included an increasing number of diagrams in successive volumes of his hugely influential Principles of Geology (1830-3). As geologists learnt how to interpret schematic cross sections down through the Earth’s crust, they gradually acquired the skill of auto¬ matically translating the vertical scale into vast expanses of time. In his search for unifying laws, Humboldt integrated human society and the natural world. By analysing the globe environmentally, he effectively divided

210

Laws

the American continent into two stereotypes—the northern temperate region capable of resembling Europe, and the southern tropics where nature flourishes exuberantly but high culture is impossible. With words and pictures, Humboldt portrayed equatorial America as a wild lush region where human travellers con¬ front the full force of nature’s mysteries. Piling on the drama, he evoked unstop¬ pable torrents and invasive vegetation, rendering the local people as forest exotica, dumbly waiting to serve their civilized visitors: When the cornice was so narrow, that we could find no place for our feet, we descended into the torrent, crossed it by fording or on the shoulders of a slave...The Indians made incisions with their large knives in the trunks of the trees, and fixed our attention on those beautiful red and yellow golden woods, which will one day be sought for by our turners and cabinet makers.^

Humboldt’s personal vision strongly influenced how the New and the Old Worlds viewed themselves as well as each other. These complex relationships are symbolized by Figure 34, the frontispiece of his Atlas of America, which portrays the multiple bonds between science, commerce, and politics. The two Europeans, the goddess of wisdom (Athena) and the god of trade (Hermes), have their arms round one another as they console the Aztec warrior they have conspired to vanquish. Emphasizing the youth of New World societies, the upturned statue (lower left) is deliberately primitive, while the scattered ruins of Mexican culture represent political turbulence and correspond to the background volcano, emblem of natural upheavals. This snovey mountain is Ecuador’s Mount Chimborazo, site of Humboldt’s personal glory—after nearly reaching its peak, he boasted that he had climbed higher than any other man. Its horizontal division is another of Humboldt’s visual devices, indicating how he had averaged masses of data to con¬ dense Latin America’s climate and agriculture into distinct environmental zones. Just as his terrestrial physics has imposed order on the young continent’s powerful forces of nature, so too European civilization will tame its unruly people. Explorers are never neutral observers. However accurately and conscientiously they record data, they select and interpret from a personal perspective. Instead of portraying a primitive continent bursting with tropical nature, Humboldt could have chosen to emphasize its well-organized agricultural cultivation. His percep¬ tions of America were coloured by his knowledge of recent archeological exped¬ itions to Egypt; in turn, Humboldt’s own accounts of southern America pervaded his successors’ attitudes towards Africa and Asia. Thanks largely to his self-promo¬ tional campaigns, Humboldt became a romantic icon who inspired Charles Darwin and many other young men to hazard their lives by travelling to remote parts of the globe. Like Humboldt, imperial explorers enticed their audiences by painting environments and peoples in lurid colours, visualizing themselves as conquerors

Laws

2II

Fig. 34 Frontispiece of Alexander von Humboldts Atlas ^v

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Now, it must here be understood that Ink is the great missive Weapon, in all Battels of the Learned, which, convey’d thro’ a sort of Engine called a Quill, infinite Numbers of these are darted at the Enemy, by the Valiant on each side, with equal Skill and Violence, as if it were an Engagement of Porcupines. —-Jonathan Swift, A Full and True Account of the Battel Fought last Friday, Between theAntient and the Modern Books in St James’s Library (1704)

I

n his campaign to prevent World War II, Einstein joined forces with his British friend, the mathematical philosopher Bertrand Russell. A more belligerent paci¬

fist than Einstein, Russell had served a couple of prison sentences, sat on pave¬ ments, and enlisted Einstein’s help for organizing an international pressure group of scientists dedicated to peace. During the first half of the twentieth century, Einstein and Russell witnessed science, government, and industry meld together. Both born in the 1870s, they lived through World War I—the chemists’ war of poi¬ son gases and explosives—and then on through World War II—the physicists’ war of radar, computers, and bombs. Science became entrenched right at the heart of political decisions, a symbiotic relationship illustrated by Figure 50, which shows the quantum physicist Robert Oppenheimer discussing an experimental explo¬ sion with his army boss. General Leslie Groves, organizer of the American bomb programme. The two atomic bombs that devastated Japan crystallized growing disillusionment. As Russell remarked, ‘Change is one thing, progress is another. “Change” is scientific,“progress” is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.’^ Warfare may have been a backward step ethically, but it did accelerate the growth of Big Science that characterized the twentieth century. Thinking big was not in itself new—Chinese and Islamic astronomers had built observatories, European Christians had built cathedrals, andVictorian industrialists had built fac¬ tories. The Big Science that mushroomed m the first half of the twentieth century was different not just in terms of size, but also by being closely linked with the

310

Decisions

Fig. 50 Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves at Ground Zero (1945).

State and with large commercial organizations. It was driven by money, manpower, machines, the military, and the media. These five Ms worked together to consolidate Big Science. As governments came to recognize the value of scientific involvement in war and defence, they poured money and manpower into building machines for military projects. For example, during World War I, Winston Churchill summoned into the British

Decisions

311

Admiralty Chaim Weizmann, a biochemist who had originally escaped from Russia by floating westwards on a log raft. In response to a War Office circular requesting useful discoveries, Weizmann had volunteered that he could produce acetone, vital for gun shells.‘Well’, demanded Churchill,‘we need thirty thousand tons of acetone. Can you make it?’^ Provided with a gin factory for his laboratory, Weizmann scaled up his bench-top chemical processes and went into mass pro¬ duction, eventually overseeing six converted distilleries and a national campaign to collect horse chestnuts as raw material. Collaboration between scientists and politicians operated in both directions. Weizmann, a committed Zionist, negotiated as his reward Britain’s promise to support the establishment of Palestine as a Jewish homeland. Other British scien¬ tists also recognized that this unprecedented call for their expertise put them into a strong bargaining position, and they stipulated requirements of their own, insisting that they be involved in policy planning and receive state funds for research. Similar changes had been taking place in other countries since the beginning of the century, and by World War II, scientific, political, industrial, and military inter¬ ests had become inextricably interwoven. The fifth M—the media—also helped science to grow. When the eclipse expedition hit the headlines in 1919, Einstein was converted into an international celebrity overnight; similarly, dramatic newspaper accounts of atomic experiments pushed high-energy physics to the front of funding queues. During the 1930s, the media fuelled an international race to discover what lies inside atomic nuclei by breaking them open. At first, scientists used X-rays and neutrons being naturally emitted from radioactive substances. Their next step was to build large acceler¬ ators that would speed up subatomic particles artificially until they were energetic enough to split a nucleus apart. The scientists who raised the most money to finance the biggest accelerators worked m the USA. Most successful of all was Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley, California. He built the first cyclotrons, circular machines that use electric and magnetic fields to make charged particles—such as electrons or protons—race faster and faster around a spiralling circular path. Lawrence started out with a conventional piece of apparatus that fitted on top of a table, but he kept thinking bigger, planning equipment on an unprecedented scale. He realized his ambitions because he persuaded business leaders—especially in the burgeoning electrical industry—that providing finance would be to their mutual advantage. Originally trained as a physicist, Lawrence became a scientific entrepreneur, effectively man¬ aging factories dedicated to producing high-energy particles. Performing a Big Science experiment came to involve many hundreds of scientists, engineers, and technicians cooperating to run an industrial-style oper¬ ation sponsored by external patrons. Swept up in his own success, as soon as one

312

Decisions

machine was under construction Lawrence started planning a still larger one, and photographs show his teams dwarfed by massive electromagnets and giant curved tubes. All over Europe and America, physicists recruited experts trained under Lawrence to help them construct their own accelerators. Inspired by his example, they enlisted the support of governments, businessmen, and medical charities to fund their own nuclear research projects. During the tense years leading up to World War II, scientists in rival laborat¬ ories—Rome, Berlin, Cambridge—were competing for first place in the race to understand what lies inside an atomic nucleus. Once military warfare started, the implications of a perplexing experiment on uranium became especially import¬ ant. This research was based in Munich, although one member of the group, the physicist Lise Meitner, sent in her contributions from Sweden. Like many Jewish scientists, she had fled to escape Nazi persecution, and these forced emigrations strongly affected scientific research. Meitner adamantly refused to be involved in the American bomb project; yet it was she who worked out the physics of nuclear fission that made the bomb possible. To explain her colleagues’ strange results, Meitner tentatively concluded that when the nucleus of a uranium atom is hit by a neutron, it splits into two, simultaneously releasing a massive amount of energy, and—just as significantly—emitting more neutrons.When these hit nearby atoms, the process is repeated, each time producing more energy and more neutrons, escalating into an explosive chain reaction that rapidly becomes unstoppable. As soon as scientists recognized this experiment’s significance, any pretence of international collaboration ceased. In scientific journals, the sudden absence of reports on nuclear research made it clear that laboratories in the USA and Britain were exploring its military potential. But what was happening in Germany? Although nobody knew for sure, a group of Jewish emigres enlisted Einstein’s help to convince the American government that a German bomb was a very real possibility. As the war proceeded, this threat provided a convenient justification for continuing, even though there was little evidence of German success. British physicists also became involved, trading in their advanced research on fission for America’s expertise in the five Ms essential for a Big Science project. Sponsored by the state, scientists set out to create destruction. During World War II, US funding for science escalated from $50 million a year to $500 million. Much of it went into the Manhattan bomb project, which operated with military efficiency after General Groves (Figure 50) took over in 1942. He started by establishing a nation-wide network of industrial sites, several of them the size of small cities, whose construction soaked up a large proportion of the budget. Radioactive elements were produced by accelerators and other giant instruments, operated by thousands and thousands of workers with no idea that they were helping to make a bomb. Because Groves imposed a strict need-to-know

Decisions

Fig.

51

313

The first nuclear pile, Chicago. Painting by Gary Sheahan (1942).

policy, by 1945 fewer than a hundred people appreciated the full scope of the development programme. Atomic towns were created in deprived areas, experi¬ ments in social planning as much as in nuclear physics. Equipped with shopping malls, cinemas, and modern fitted kitchens, their military goals were concealed beneath American normality. The atmosphere was totally different m experimental stations such as Chicago and Los Alamos, where atomic scientists worked with unprecedented fervour, swept up in their shared enthusiasm to solve problems. Many of them later remarked that these wartime activities had been the best of their lives, and the painting in Figure 51 illustrates how their experiences became romanticized. Dramatically lit, these physicists are poised in expectation, formally dressed in the fashion of the time, and radiating an almost palpable tension as they wait to see whether the Munich discovery of nuclear fission could operate on a larger scale. No indication here that they were miserably cold and dirty, working in sub-zero temperatures and graphite-laden air beneath a Chicago football stand, many of them in pain from accidents incurred during the unplanned building process. The man in charge, standing on the balcony of this converted squash court and holding a slide-rule m his hand, is Enrico Fermi, who has managed to escape from Fascist Italy. On the right, the stepped brick structure is the experimental

314

Decisions

nuclear pile containing radioactive materials; three young men sit on top as a suicide squad, ready to dowse the pile with chemicals if it runs out of control. On the basement floor, another scientist manually operates a cadmium rod to control the fission rate. After hours of waiting and an unscheduled lunch break, Fermi eventually tells him to withdraw the rod further. The clicks of the neutron counter merge into a roar, the recording pens go off the scale, and Fermi raises his hand to halt the trial and announce its success. In some ways more crucial than Fliroshima, this was the decisive day when it became clear that a bomb was possible. The observers reported feeling flat after¬ wards, forced to contemplate the unknown consequences of what was supposed to be a triumph. They communicated in coded telephone messages, speaking of Fermi as a new Columbus, the Italian navigator who had landed in the new world to find that the natives were friendly. Soon, Fermi moved to the cloistered community of Los Alamos, a self-sufficient industrial township hidden away in the New Mexican desert, where soldiers, scientists, and engineers collaborated to solve the outstanding practical problem. How could nuclear fission be safely pack¬ aged inside a transportable bomb? To run Los Alamos, Groves appointed Oppenheimer, a quantum physicist with no experience of organization. Although apparently an ill-matched pair, the ruth¬ less workaholic general and the nervous intellectual with left-wing leanings made excellent working partners (Figure 50). Smashing their way through decisions, they abandoned normal protocols of pilot schemes and spent lavishly in order to achieve their goal. After Germany surrendered in May 1945, the original claim of needing the bomb as a European deterrent finally lost all validity. But for those involved, it was hard to stop when the goal was so close. In any case, the Americans were still at war with Japan—even Fermi’s five-year-old son had learnt to chant ‘We’ll wipe the Japs / Out of the maps.’^ Oppenheimer set up a full-scale test that he code-named Trinity, his idiosyn¬ cratic interpretation of the Christian concept that through death comes redemp¬ tion. As in Chicago, the workers endured miserable conditions, afflicted by the desert’s stifling heat, razor-sharp yucca, scorpions, and tarantulas; allowed only cold showers, they hunted antelope for food. In July 1945, around the same time that a real bomb was being loaded onto a Pacific ship, an experimental device was winched to the top of Ground Zero’s cast-iron tower, which stretched 100 feet up and was cemented 20 feet down into the earth. Busloads of visitors arrived to watch the early-morning detonation, but they were unprepared for the extent of the devastation. The photographic and verbal images of blazing suns and mush¬ rooming clouds are familiar. Less so, are some of the statistics—exploded rabbits at 800 yards, temperatures of 750°F at 1500 yards, temporary blindness at nine miles. Afterwards, the scientist and the soldier contemplated the tower’s vaporized

Decisions

315

remains (Figure 50). Oppenheimer recalled Vishnu’s cry in the Hindu holy writ¬ ings

‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’—but was said to strut

around in his hat like a High Noon cowboy; Groves commented that the war would only be over when two bombs had been dropped on Japan. Groves and Oppenheimer both backed the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the following month, and their Los Alamos colleagues were mostly overjoyed when they realized that those years of dedication had paid off, that their project had proved a success. At least, they were initially. After the photographs were pub¬ lished, and the casualty figures were announced, and radiation sickness appeared, they were less sure. As one German emigre put it, ‘it seemed rather ghoulish to celebrate the sudden death of a hundred thousand people even if they were enemies.’'^ The self-congratulation might seem unthinkingly callous, but patriotic militants believed (and still do) that dropping the bombs was the right decision. Suddenly, physicists had become national heroes. A few of them successfully demanded funding to develop more efficient nuclear weapons, ones that would kill people without damaging buildings. Many accommodated their consciences by working on university research projects that, although sponsored by military organ¬ izations, were not immediately directed towards warfare. But others wanted nothing more to do with death and radiation. They turned instead to studying life. Their inspiration was Erwin Schrodinger, an Austrian pioneer of quantum mechanics who had fled to Dublin during the war. In Figure 49, the photograph of the 1927 Solvay conference, Schrodinger is standing in the back row directly behind Einstein (no coincidence that Schrodmger’s suit appears different from the rest—his lifelong habit of wearing hiking clothes meant that he was often turned away from official functions). Like Einstein, although he was responsible for important mathematical equations describing waves and particles, Schrodinger never accepted that probabilities could represent the ultimate answers. In 1945, in a small but hugely influential book called What is Life?, he urged scientists to search for the biological equivalent of quantum laws, to formulate physical descriptions of growth, inheritance, and other inexplicable phenomena. In a warwrecked world, only the USA, Britain, and France were m any position to fund research, and that was where physicists migrated—towards the money, and towards a future in biology, the new manifestation of Big Science.

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. —William Shakespeare,‘Sonnet 94’

T

he newspapers of 1953 had many momentous events to report. That year, Presidents Tito and Eisenhower assumed power, but Josef Stalin lost it;

lung cancer was linked with smoking; the Soviet Union exploded a hydrogen bomb; and two men reached the top of Mount Everest. But fifty years later, those stories that had once dominated the headlines no longer seemed so gripping. Instead, anniversary festivities revolved around a short report originally tucked away inside Nature, a British academic journal. Written by two unknown scien¬ tists from Cambridge, this article’s deliberately understated conclusion had at the time been ignored by journalists in search of an exciting lead.‘It has not escaped our notice’, the two researchers remarked laconically, ‘that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.’^ To translate from that dry scientific language—Francis Crick and James Watson claimed that by unravelling the structure of complex molecules lying inside genes, they had revealed the secrets of inheritance. Their low-key announcement in Nature now symbolizes a new age of molecular biology. Since then, the double helix of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) has been trans¬ formed into a cultural icon. The early clumsy structures of clamps and hand-made plates (Figure 52) have been stylized by countless artists into elegant twin spirals reproduced not only in biology textbooks, but also as sculptures, perfume bottles, and bracelets (unfortunately, the DNA door-handles at London’s Royal Society were initially installed upside down). Like a modern-day caduceus (the ancient twined-snakes symbol of medicine), this molecular model has been abstracted into a double helix that represents the entire scientific enterprise—instantly recogniz¬ able, even when not understood. But it has also become a Frankenstein emblem, featuring prominently in propaganda directed against contentious research projects such as cloning, genetically modified crops, and biological weapons.

Decisions

317

Converting Crick and Watson’s crude model into a universal symbol involved hard publicity veork and also self-promotion. As Crick himself liked to empha¬ size, it was not the scientific couple who made the model, but the model that made them. From the contact prints of Figure 52, Watson picked out the second frame, which has become an icon of scientific discovery, apparently capturing the Cambridge couple at their moment of triumph. The crude Meccano-like structure and the bare laboratory with its old-fashioned sink imply that post¬ war austerity has been overcome by the youthful discipline of molecular biology. Gesturing with his slide-rule, leather patches on his elbows. Crick assumes the role of scruffy intellectual hero, while Watson gazes up, an American boy-genius awed by his marvellous molecule. Although clearly posed, this photograph prom¬ ises a privileged glimpse into the workshop of scientific knowledge. The camera never lies, but, but, but... this was a demonstration model not used in making the discovery. Crick’s slide-rule was an irrelevant stage prop, and the photographs were taken months afterwards (even the date is disputed). Snapshot 2 only became iconic fifteen years later, when Watson included it in The Double Helix, his racy scientific thriller about the pursuit of DNA. Much criticized, this bestselling book glorified his own role, but downplayed the contributions of a London research team headed by Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, who had published their findings in the same issue of Nature. Figure 53 shows a London X-ray photograph, taken by Franklin but leaked by Wilkins, that provided the vital clue for Watson. In his words,‘The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race.’^ It is this photograph, not the one of the Cambridge pair, that deserves to be cele¬ brated, because it provided clinching evidence for the structure of DNA. Although not an expert,Watson immediately recognized that the prominent X-shape revealed a helix; later, he realized that the bars and diamonds reveal a double rather than a single spiral, carrying repetitive atomic pattern down its length. Analysing the com¬ plexities of this photograph involves careful measurements and long calculations. Nevertheless, Watson’s sneak preview inspired him to head off in a new direction. Watson romanticized science as an exciting, ruthless race. Intelligent yet impul¬ sive and vain, he cast himself 111 The Double Helix as a cavalier American bemused by Cambridge quaintness and obsessed with sex and tennis. According to his own heroic account, Watson defied his boss’s instructions to get on with his own work, and instead engaged m clandestine meetings with Crick as they struggled to solve science’s biggest puzzle. Although they came from different intellectual backgrounds—Crick a physicist, Watson a biologist—they shared an interest m genetics and their areas of expertise complemented each other. To fill in the gaps, they gleaned information by skimming articles and quizzing the prestigious vis¬ itors who passed through Cambridge.

Decisions

3i8

Fig. 52

Photographs of James Watson (dark jacket) and Francis Crick (light jacket) with a

DNA model, Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge (May 1953). Contact prints of the photographs by Antony Barrington-Brown.

In Watsons rule book, all means were valid for reaching his desired goal of being the first to get the right answer—even if it meant appropriating the results of Franklin, denigrated by him as a badly dressed woman who refused to wear lipstick and had foolishly intruded into a man s world. Like Watson, Franklin perceived herself as an outsider, ill-at-ease in the culture of a British laboratory after enjoying a research spell in Paris. Led to believe that she was in charge of her own project, Franklin resented interference and protected herself against discrimination by working alone. In comparison with Watson s trial-and-error approach, she proceeded methodically, systematically investigating the molecules she isolated. Whereas Crick and Watson built models on a trial basis as tools of investigation, Franklin gave them a secondary role of visualizing structures already deduced analytically.

Decisions

319

Chance brought together Crick, a long-term itinerant Ph.D. student in his mid¬ thirties, with Watson, an ambitious and much younger postdoctoral researcher in search of a topic. By then, scientists around the world had already come to the con¬ clusion that genetic information is carried not by proteins, as had been believed until fairly recently, but by nucleic acids, intricate chains of molecules linked into even more complex structures. Drawn by the excitement of the chase. Crick and Watson decided to focus on just one of these acids—DNA.That turned out to be a lucky choice, since It was still unclear that DNA was the key player. In contrast with inert substances, in living cells strings of chemical units are arranged in a definite order. Crucially, this order is determined genetically, so that—somewhere, somehow—there must be a code, a set of instructions, determining how the umts are arranged. In retrospect, real¬ izing the need for a code sounds like a sudden flash of inspiration. In reality, like many scientific concepts, it emerged from countless meticulous research projects.

320

Decisions

Fig. 53

X-ray diffraction

photograph of DNA taken by Rosalind Franklin and Ray Gosling (2 May 1952).

Taking advantage of discoveries emerging from other laboratories, Crick and Watson melded together three different approaches that already existed. Some research groups concentrated on exploring the physical structure of complex molecules, while others examined them from a chemical perspective. In addition, inspired by Schrodinger’s What is Life?, some scientists were campaigning for a radically different approach to the enigma of life. They believed that just as quantum mechanics had been developed to cope with the uncertainties of the subatomic world, so too a similar leap of intellectual imagination was required to explain the mysteries of inheritance. For them, the key to understanding hered¬ ity was information. Fiow is it that living cells pass on characteristics from one generation to another? Choosing the right organism to study is crucial in biology. Early in the twentieth century, scientists had investigated the genes of fruit-flies {Drosophila, Figure 46), but the next generation worked with far simpler organisms—phages, small viruses consisting of a protein coat wrapped around a nucleic acid. Easy to grow, repro¬ ducing themselves in around half an hour and consisting of only two molecules, phage viruses proved the ideal subjects for deciding whether proteins or acids are responsible for inheritance. The year after Crick and Watson met at Cambridge, they learnt that a recent phage experiment had conclusively favoured DNA.They

Decisions

321

set about combining this focus on information with more traditional investiga¬ tions into the mechanical structure and chemical behaviour of molecules. Watson was a flagging phage geneticist, bored with chemistry and with little experience in exploring the architecture of large molecules, a type of research especially important in Britain. The major technique was X-ray crystallography, a speciality that included an unusually high number of women in top positions, such as the crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin (Figure 48), head of Oxford’s laboratory and a Nobel Prize-winner. In principle, the technique is simple—by sending beams of X-rays through a crystal, researchers produce patterns of dots on a screen, from which they work out a molecule’s internal structure. Actuality is very different. As Franklin’s Figure 53 indicates, huge amounts of skill and patience are needed even to obtain a clear image, let alone build up a three-dimensional structure from a series of two-dimensional pictures. X-ray photography demands careful chemistry, precise measurement, and experienced interpretation. For the expert Franklin, this photograph was just one of many pieces of evidence that she was assessing systematically, taking enough time as she went along to master fully all the necessary techniques—a methodical approach endorsed by Hodgkin. In contrast, Watson described how he lurched from one faulty hypothesis to the next, homing in on the double helix through flashes of intuition and snippets of information borrowed from specialists. As Watson and Crick grappled with their three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, they garnered only the pieces of information they required to help them juggle their cut-out shapes into a structure compatible with all the data. After many blind alleys and lucky flukes, they eventually hit on a version that made sense and took account of everything. For years afterwards, hordes of molecular biologists dedicated themselves to working out the details, explaining how DNA molecules can unravel into their two separate strands before combining with new partners to wrap themselves into a unique pattern. Molecular genetics brought together two separate strands of biology—the elec¬ trochemical activities inside cells, and Darwinian theories of evolution by natural selection. To trace lines of evolutionary descent, scientists had previously concen¬ trated on examining visible characteristics, such as animals’ skeletons or plants’ reproductive organs. Once the internal structure of genes had been exposed, they had a new tool for establishing evolutionary relationships, which provided a fresh type of evidence for confirming Darwin’s conclusions. Even so, it did little to convince the unconverted—on the contrary, as scientific support for evolution by natural selection piled up in the second half of the twentieth century, oppos¬ ition got stronger. Fundamentalist Christians retreated to the security of the Bible, while other enthusiasts replaced the traditional God by an Intelligent Designer, neglecting to explain what sort of intelligence is displayed by a designer who plans people with strain-prone backs and large-headed babies.

322

Decisions

Deciphering DNA was celebrated as a great triumph, but the enigma of life itself remained unresolved. To cut through that problem, reductionism came back into scientific fashion. In this twentieth-century version, genes acquired a new reputation as the fundamental components of life and society, determining what an organism looks like and how it behaves. Research teams around the world embarked on an ambitious international programme to map the human genome, to find the arrangement of the chemical subgroups making up every single gene. The life sciences had formerly been regarded as a soft option, the province of women and amateurs, but governments starting pouring funds into genetic research, the new rival of physics and space flight. Like landing on the Moon, mapping the human genome provided propaganda material not only for science but also for individual countries. Scientists took advantage of political tensions to solicit state support; for example, in France they stressed the need to prevent American dominance, while their British counterparts highlighted the dangers of the brain drain across the Atlantic. Genetic research also moved outside laboratories to analyse society. A new sci¬ entific discipline emerged in the 1970s—sociobiology, headed by Edward Wilson (usually referred to as E. O. Wilson), an American researcher who originally stud¬ ied ants, but then leapt to a general theory of human beings. Two basic stages were involved. First, sociobiologists examined their own and other societies to find which elements are common to all; next, they made a theoretical jump, stating that these characteristics are universal because they are coded in people’s genes. On that logic, since responsibilities are almost universally carved up between the sexes, men are genetically programmed to work and women to stay at home. Opponents accused sociobiologists of giving scientific validity to political repres¬ sion—change is fruitless, the argument runs, because people are doomed by genes that have survived three billion years of evolutionary struggle. A paradox remained at the heart of evolution. If life is a battle for survival, then why are people nice to one another, why do they behave altruistically with no clear benefit to themselves? One of Wilson’s disciples, the British zoologist Richard Dawkins, introduced a new term into the English language—‘the selfish gene’, a metaphor that soon solidified into reality. When Darwin put forward his theory of aggressive survival, he incorporated the competitive ethos ofVictorian capitalism; in Dawkins’ version, self-interest is encoded in our molecules. Dawkins maintained ruthlessness in the natural world by claiming that individual genes, not entire organisms, are ceaselessly trying to eliminate their molecular com¬ petitors. From his sociobiological perspective, although acts of human generos¬ ity may appear to be altruistic, they conceal fights being waged deep inside our cells, where the genes are selfishly influencing our behaviour to ensure their own future. Dawkins provided a memorable way of explaining chemical interactions,

Decisions

323

but in reality—as his critics point out—genes can’t think, and they can’t have motives, selfish or otherwise.Yet despite its limitations, this verbal model extended its grip. By the 1980s, any idealistic notion that genetic research was directed solely towards uncovering the truths of nature had evaporated. Molecular biology had been supplanted by biotechnology. Genes were no longer discovered, but were artefacts engineered in the laboratory—which meant they could be patented. The ideology of scientific detachment took yet another knock as commercial companies moved m to market the basic components of life. Universities started to resemble industrial concerns, employing researchers bound by rules of secrecy and aiming to generate profitable inventions owned by the institution, not the individual. Early hopes that the secrets of life could be found by unwrapping helices proved to be illusory. Real molecules turned out to be far messier than laboratory models, full of mistakes and repetitions. Far from being neatly packed with information, a molecule of DNA contains relatively few effective genes, which lie scattered amongst chemical detritus. Still more problematically, it started to become clear that genes are not responsible for everything—humans and chimpanzees share almost 99% of their DNA, which doesn’t leave much over for explaining the differences between them. The old nature/nurture debate reappeared in a new guise, with environmental influences extended to include genes’ chemical surroundings inside cells. Although the human genome project promised great medical benefits, few have been realized because genetic interactions proved to be extremely complicated. There are no single genes for heart disease or cancer, let alone for slimness, sexual proclivity, or intelligence. In any case, new ethical problems have arisen. Tinkering around with cells to be passed onto future generations is an alarming prospect, because things can so easily go wrong. And who gets to decide when a difference becomes a defect? Although many people would feel happy about eradicating Huntington’s disease (devastating, progressive, incurable), other inherited conditions seem more equivocal. Tidying up the human race to eliminate supposedly undesirable features sounds too close to Nazi schemes of purification. Like eugenics, gene therapy is a medical science launched with good intentions, but laden with political potential.

3

Cosmology

Two roads diverged in a wood and I— I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference —Robert Frost.,‘The Road Not Taken’ (1916)

J

ames Watson turned his status as a non-specialist into a positive advantage through portraying himself as a scientific bricoleur, an intellectual adventurer

who had decoded the secrets of inheritance by patching together snippets purloined from various disciplines. But other pioneers who displayed such enterprising panache were pilloried for venturing into areas outside their own expertise. When Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist, died on an Arctic ice sheet in 1930, he knew that his novel suggestions about the Earth’s structure had been rejected by professional geologists. More than thirty years went by before he became a posthumous hero of the Earth sciences, his notion of continental drift finally vindicated in the 1960s. Like Crick and Watson, Wegener had decided to tackle one of science’s great outstanding challenges; also like them, he operated by backing intuitive insights with information borrowed from other specialities, welding them together into a fresh solution. Traditionally, geology had been about dating rocks and identify¬ ing fossils, but Wegener studied the Earth as a whole object—like a cosmologist, he tried to understand how our planet has developed since its creation to take on the form it has now. Unfortunately, although he produced a model that was appealingly simple, Wegener had no mechanism to explain how it might work. Orthodox geologists (especially American ones) panned the theories of this German enthusiast, castigating him for gleaning knowledge from books in a library instead of venturing out into the field to gain practical experience. Wegener’s first inspiration came in 1910, when he noticed that the edges of Africa and South America fit together like pieces in a jigsaw. Unsurprisingly, other people had also spotted this match, but Wegener was the first to build it

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into an entire theory—admittedly, one that was easy to knock down, although it did attempt to resolve long-standing conflicts between different sects of geolo¬ gists. Old-fashioned disciples of Charles Lyell, the geologist who had influenced Charles Darwin, argued that the Earth is in a steady state of gradual change, slowly being transformed over aeons at the same uniform rate. Ranged against Lyell’s supporters were modern catastrophists, who insisted that upheavals were far more dramatic in the past than now; backed up by physicists, they explained that the Earth has been cooling down, shrinking as it goes to create rumpled mountain ranges like the wrinkled skin on an ageing apple. By the early twentieth century, that picture no longer seemed right either. The sums showed that contraction through cooling was not enough to account for the elephantine folds on the Earth’s surface. Another complication was the varied composition of the Earth’s crust—it had become clear that the continents are not made of the same material as the ocean floors, but resemble light rafts resting on a harder bed. And to make matters worse, after radioactivity was discovered, physi¬ cists claimed that the globe has maintained a steady temperature, centrally heated by nuclear decay deep within its core. Confronted by diverse groups, each with its own preoccupations, Wegener attempted to reconcile their jarring perspectives by picking out those elements that supported his jigsaw view of the world. Wegener rescued the idea that there had once been a super-continent, which he named Pangaea. The top diagram in Figure 54 shows the Earth roughly 300 million years ago, with most of the land concentrated in Pangaea. Very gradually, Wegener explained, this single mass drifted apart into recognizable continents, crumpling up to form mountain ranges. Ffis bottom map shows their positions about 2 million years ago, at the beginning of the present geological period. To support his case, Wegener marshalled plenty of ancillary evidence. An expert in ancient climates, he pointed out how well his theory explained the historical patterns of glaciation far away from the poles. He also summoned up confirm¬ ation from fossil records and geological formations, arguing that they continue on either side of oceans like lines of print on a torn newspaper. Wegener’s geological opponents remained unconvinced. All very well for an amateur outsider to draw pretty diagrams, they sneered—but where was the hard evidence? Of all the problems that Wegener had decided to ignore and tidy up later, the most serious was the question of how all this worked. Why and how did continents drift? Neither Wegener nor his followers could come up with a rea¬ sonable answer. His notion of continental drift was put on hold until after World War II, when attitudes towards studying the Earth had changed. By the time of the post-war Cold War, the challenge of deciphering the world’s long-distant past was no longer the preserve of traditional geologists examining fossils and strata. Instead, the new umbrella discipline of Earth sciences now also

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Fig. 5 4

Alfred Wegener’s maps

showing three stages in the Earth’s development. Alfred Wegener, The Origin of

Continents and Oceans (1924).

Old Quarternai

embraced seismologists, meteorologists, oceanographers—specialists who were trained in mathematical physics and regarded the entire Earth as one single unit. As well as examining its surface, they investigated its internal structures, its oceans, and its atmosphere; they also studied the effects of its cosmological environment, such as the space weather of the Sun’s magnetic storms. Unlike geology. Earth sci¬ ence was Big Science, attracting massive levels of funding not only from industrial sponsors searching for minerals, but also from states searching for status.The USA was competing against Soviet Russia to conquer space, but it also launched Project Mohole, a colossally expensive plan (later abandoned) to send probes deep, deep into the Earth’s interior. Some Earth scientists worked for the army, mapping sea floors so that enemy submarines could be tracked more easily. They came up with surprising results.

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Instead of being thick, old, and even, the ocean beds turned out to be thin, recent (well, in geological terms, that is), and crossed by even younger north—south ridges lying beneath the waters. Stranger still, the rocks on either side of these mid-ocean mountain ranges had striped magnetic bands trapped within them, permanent records of the Earth’s past. Meanwhile, up on solid land, geophysicists were uncovering evidence that the Earth’s magnetism has changed several times during its history. And while these (and many other) results were accumulating, in 1962 a book appeared that changed how scientists thought about their own activities—Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Public disillusion was growing rapidly, fuelled by campaigns to abandon nuclear weapons, ban pesticides, and reappraise the research priorities of a maledominated society. Science, it was becoming clear, did not necessarily guarantee progress. Kuhn was a catastrophist rather than a uniformitarian. According to him, science’s history has been punctuated by a series of revolutions, each precipitated when the evidence against prevailing opinion piles up to an unbearable weight. For instance, before Copernicus, astronomers devised what now seem extraor¬ dinary schemes to shore up an Earth-centred system, clinging to complicated epicycles even though their predictions failed to match observations. Eventually, said Kuhn, a crisis point is reached. The old model is jettisoned, and the next generation’s efforts are devoted to normal science—refining the new version, testing it against observations, and establishing a fresh paradigm governing how people think about the world. Until, that is, discrepancies start accumulating...and another revolution occurs. Inspired by the gratifying prospect of being hailed as revolutionaries. Earth sci¬ entists self-consciously presented themselves as Kuhnian paradigm shifters. Their Eureka! moment, the geological equivalent of Newton’s falling apple or Watt’s boiling kettle, came in 1965, when a hypothetical pattern of magnetic stripes meshed perfectly with the observations of an ocean-trawling team. Although much tidymg-up was needed, this match symbolized the birth of plate tecton¬ ics. Conveniently, a ready-made hero was available—Alfred Wegener, whose ideas shared some features of the new theory. Wegener had imagined the continents drifting around the world, but now they were envisaged as being carried along on top of giant plates kept in constant motion while rock circulates beneath the oceans, welling up at ridges and plunging down again into trenches. It seemed like an ideal Kuhnian revolution. Introduced rapidly, plate tectonics overturned older models and dramatically resolved intellectual tensions that had been building up since the beginning of the century. Earth scientists settled down to normal science, reconciling this vision of slow perpetual change with Lyell’s umformitarianism. But soon there was another upheaval—^this tranquil period of consolidation was disrupted by suggestions that asteroids arrive periodically

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from outer space, jolting the Earth abruptly from one geological period into another. Reflecting contemporary fears of nuclear winters, disaster scenario scien¬ tists envisaged meteoric bombardments producing clouds of debris that blocked off the light, dooming dinosaurs and other species into extinction. Terrestrial uniformitarianism was once again being challenged, this time by cosmological catastrophism. Geology had previously been distinct from astronomy, but they developed in tandem during the twentieth century. Affected similarly by wars, funding, and mathematization, they became subsumed within the new Big Sciences of Earth science and cosmology. Even those boundaries were blurring. Earth scientists were taking space environments into account, and cosmologists required geo¬ logical expertise for analysing other-world rocks for traces of life. As the asteroid theory illustrates, they were also addressing the same fundamental question—is change gradual or violent? Earth scientists’ debates about continental drift were accompanied by cosmological arguments about the entire Universe—is it eter¬ nally stable, or did it originate explosively? Deciding whether the Universe is uniform or variable was affected by personal convictions as well as by hard evidence. Despite the massive instruments, complex mathematics, and industrial-scale projects characterizing Big Science, the scien¬ tists themselves were real people, not rational automata.Take Einstein. In what he later admitted was his greatest blunder, he allowed his own conviction that the Universe is stable to override the prediction of his own General Relativity theory that it is expanding. Although he held out against his critics for years, eventually he heard about some startling results implying that he was wrong. Determined to find out for himself, while Wegener was travelling to his death in Greenland, Einstein was making plans to visit California and meet the astronomer Edwin Hubble. Hubble is famous for the space telescope named after him, but he was nick¬ named ‘The Major’ for his aristocratic behaviour and English affectations (such as ‘come a cropper’). Soon after serving as an officer in World War I, Hubble had become embroiled in American astronomy’s biggest controversy. Is there one single massive galaxy, or many smaller ones spread out through space as island universes? Although scientists supposedly make decisions by analysing data, in this case they could not agree on what the data meant. Both sides claimed they had convin¬ cing proof, but the same observations can be used to back up different theories— watching a dawn together, Ptolemy would see a rising Sun, but Galileo would see a falling Earth. Gradually, the single-galaxy lobby gained favour, not so much because they had better facts, but more because their leaders were better at arguing. Astronomers needed a ruler for measuring the Universe, and it was provided by a human computer, Henrietta Leavitt, one of countless women employed during

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|

329

the past three hundred years as scientific drudges. Intelligent enough to undertake calculations, yet sufficiently desperate for work to tolerate long hours and low wages, they include not only pre-electronic mathematicians generating tables of figures, but also 1960s housewives recruited to decipher the photographic tracks of subatomic particles. At Harvard in the early twentieth century, the computers’ task was to trawl through photographic plates, gauging the brightness of each star with a standardized palette. Although Leavitt, a reclusive semi-invalid, was paid to toil, not to think, she manipulated her employer into giving her work on her own terms, and she identified a special type of flashing star. When she plotted each star’s brightness against its pulse-rate, she came out with a straight-line graph, which Hubble later used to work out the distance of a new star he had discovered. His answer was so vast that the single-galaxy advocates caved in, and admitted that multiple universes were more likely. By then, Leavitt was dead, her personal details forgotten, her glory appropriated by the observatory’s director. Hubble went on to draw his own straight-line graph, using Leavitt’s flashing stars to work out the distances of island galaxies and then plot them against speed. It was this result that made Einstein think again, because Hubble showed that the further away a galaxy is, the faster it is flying away from the Earth. As Einstein explained at Oxford on his return (see the blackboard of Figure 40), Hubble’s dia¬ gram confirmed the consequence of Relativity Theory that Einstein himself had been so reluctant to accept—the Universe started out as a small dense cluster and has been expanding ever since. As Hubble’s local newspaper put it, ‘Youth who Left Ozark Mountains to Study Stars Causes Einstein to Change His Mind’.^ Although Einstein was converted to cosmic expansion, some of the scien¬ tists who followed him disagreed. Their reservations were theological as well as scientific. Battle lines were drawn up around the middle of the century, symbol¬ ically led by two Cambridge astronomers, Martin Ryle and Fred Hoyle. On one side were ranked Ryle’s Big Bang theorists, who claimed that the Universe has exploded outwards from a minute yet massive centre. For them, this was the only way to explain Hubble’s expansion and Einstein’s relativity. As an added advantage, it was compatible with the Bible’s first sentence, ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ Other scientists—especially Fred Hoyle, a professed atheist—-abhorred this intrusion of religious views into science. Rejecting the bib¬ lical notion that God’s cosmos has a trajectory through time, they insisted that the Universe is in a steady state, gradually expanding as matter is constantly created, but always appearing the same, from wherever you look at it. The Big Bang advocates were convinced they had won in the early 1960s, when Ryle gained two experimental vindications. One came from the Bell Telephone laboratories in America, where astronomers announced that they had at last worked out the cause of some radio noise that had been disturbing their

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telescopes (they even cleaned off pigeon-droppings to eliminate every possible source). To them, it seemed clear that they were picking up a low-temperature radiation permeating the whole of space—thus confirming an earlier prediction of what to expect if the cosmos had cooled off after an initial explosion. The other significant discovery was a new type of radio stars, dubbed quasars, found only at huge distances from the Earth and apparently racing rapidly away. Rather than admit defeat, Hoyle and his supporters behaved like Kuhnian reac¬ tionaries, propping up their increasingly untenable theory in the face of mounting counter-evidence. Yet although steady-state ideas faded away, Hoyle had a great effect on cosmology because he popularized it. When Hoyle promoted his own views on radio and in magazines, his Big Bang rivals accused him of dirty tactics. Nevertheless, by bringing abstruse scientific arguments out of rarified journals and into the daily media, Hoyle engaged public support, essential for encouraging governments to increase funding. The astronomers who ridiculed Hoyle ultim¬ ately benefited because space research became fashionable, making it easier for scientific pressure groups to solicit state backing. Although Einstein eventually agreed that the Universe is expanding, he never accepted the ultimate validity of quantum mechanics, despite his own import¬ ance in establishing the subatomic rules of probability. For him, they were merely mathematical tools, not descriptions of reality, and he spent decades searching in vain for comprehensive formulae to encapsulate the cosmos. In contrast, during the central third of the twentieth century, most theoretical physicists focused on the quantum realm, providing conceptual tools which could be used by laboratory researchers to investigate minute particles. Einstein’s curved space-time became an intellectual backwater, occupied by a small faction of lone mathematicians. Unexpectedly, General Relativity bounced back into fashion in the 1960s, after Einstein himself had died. This theory without an application suddenly came into its own, because the celestial bodies being revealed by powerful radio telescopes were large and fast enough to be affected by its equations. To describe these relativistic wonders, exotic names started to accumulate. Quasars were rapidly followed by pulsars (which also emit radiation, but appear to flash), detected as rare minute blips on a Cambridge printout by Jocelyn Bell (who indignantly warded off suggestions from her disbelieving supervisor that they were due to interference from the BBC, and has since become a major activist for women’s rights in science). The most renowned astronomical wonders were black holes, the name given in an inspired PR move to theoretical points that Einstein had disdained as irrele¬ vant mathematical curiosities. Like the grin of a Cheshire cat, a black hole is the core of a star that has faded from view to become detectable only from its gravi¬ tational pull. By the 1980s, black holes had been joined by wormholes, strings.

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dark matter, and gravity waves, making high-energy astrophysics a high-profile science amongst people with little idea of what the words meant. It even boasted its own media star, Stephen Hawking, epitome of a disembodied genius, whose Brief History of Time is probably the least-read bestseller of all time. This alien cosmology dazzles its admirers; yet despite its novelty, some objec¬ tions are familiar. Einstein’s distinction between mathematical equations that describe and philosophical models that explain is fundamental to science. Although Einstein recognized that quantum mechanics is useful for describing bizarre phe¬ nomena, he believed that its basis in probability was provisional, an interim solu¬ tion disguising human ignorance of the superior plan devised by a God who does not play dice with the Universe. Similarly, cosmologists acknowledge that while black holes, strings, and their esoteric companions are valuable concepts that work mathematically, their physical existence may make little sense. By the end of the twentieth century, atheists were boasting aggressively that science had eliminated the need for religion. Yet although cosmologists were peering out to the edge of the Universe and reaching back in time to its origins, they had arrived no nearer to disproving the existence of God. Tracking the his¬ tory of the Universe from the instant after the Big Bang is a stellar achievement— but it leaves unanswered the fundamental question of how the Big Bang started in the first place. As so often in science, how you interpret the evidence depends on how you want to see it.

4

Jnformation Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? —T.S. Eliot, The Rock (1934)

I

ronically, the history of information processing is shrouded in secrecy Google now provides instant access to more than anyone needs to know, but com¬

puters were developed under a need-to-know policy that restricted information flow. Large electronic calculators originated as military inventions designed to crack enemy codes or compute missile paths, and were protected by stringent security precautions to ensure that no details leaked out. It was only in 2000 that the British Government declassified its official account (whimsically disguised as ‘General Report on Tunny’) of the wartime equipment developed at Bletchley Park, a camouflaged military base. Electronic information may flash freely round the Internet, but it is also enmeshed in a worldwide web of secrecy. As science became militarized in the mid-twentieth century, two ideologies clashed. Scientists believed (well, in principle, anyway) in exchanging informa¬ tion freely so that progress could take place as rapidly as possible. In contrast, intelligence personnel compartmentalized activities into small cells, each with limited knowledge. These opposing approaches, both taken for granted by their advocates, came into head-on conflict when military commanders started taking over wartime projects involving scientific researchers—atomic bombs, electronic computers. Instead of sharing their results at international conferences, scientists were obliged to respect the constraints imposed by national security. This close-guarded culture continued to permeate computer science during the Cold War, when research remained under wraps, directed towards developing clandestine defence systems. In its eagerness to gain electronic superiority over the Russians, the US government poured money not only into the armed forces, but also into universities and private companies producing computers for busi¬ nesses. As the cartoon of Figure 55 illustrates, military, academic, and commercial

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Fig. 55

333

Machine intelligence.

Front cover of Time magazine, 23 Jan. 1950.

interests were intertwined.This computer, the Harvard Mark III, was produced in a university laboratory, sponsored by IBM, and—as indicated by the embroidered hat and sleeves—was designed for the Navy. In this symbiotic relationship, it seemed that everybody stood to win. Commercial enterprises gained state funding to see them through rocky times, and also benefited from a large guaranteed market; at the same time, military experts had immediate access to the latest results. But there were hidden down¬ sides. Scientific researchers not on the government’s payroll found it extremely hard to obtain computing facilities—and those who did accept funding could no longer claim allegiance to an ethic of openness, but were bound to secrecy by their employers. Operating secretly and separately, military inventors in three countries—Britain, Germany, and the USA—worked on computers during World War II. Civilians first gained some inkling of this research in 1946, when the American Army called a press conference to unveil its Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC), constructed within a university department but controlled by uniformed

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56 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC), 1945.

men and women (Figure 56).To enhance its visual impact for the launch, special display panels had been hastily constructed with light bulbs flickering behind halved table tennis balls. The gigantic banks of electrical equipment filled a large room, yet were nowhere near as fast and powerful as a small modern laptop. Even so, the newspaper reports were ecstatic about this artificial machine, whose internal devices operated hundreds of times quicker than neurones inside the brain—an exhilarating if scary concept. Although the media celebrated ENIAC as the world’s first electronic computer, it did suffer from drawbacks. It relied on 18,000 valves (tubes), electronic on—off devices resembling light-bulbs which often blew out and had to be replaced by human operators. As the valves flashed on and off, they generated immense amounts of heat, so that keeping early computers cool was a major problem. There were also insects to contend with, since invasive moths and flies could wreak havoc with the internal connections: the programming term ‘to debug’ had literal origins m early electronic machines. Still more seriously, there were inher¬ ent limitations to the machine’s capabilities. ENIAC had originally been designed

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to generate tables of shell trajectories, but asking it to do anything else—weather forecasting, for instance, or calculating how shock waves move—required several days of manual rewiring, mostly carried out by women. Rather than being a proto¬ type computer, ENIAC was a giant calculator—there was no way of telling it to carry out a different type of calculation without physically rebuilding it. Unknown to all but a handful of British scientists, more versatile machines were already operating at Bletchley Park, again with a military purpose—to pene¬ trate the German intelligence network by deciphering their coded communica¬ tions. Secrecy was of paramount importance, since the project’s success depended on preventing the Germans from realizing that, despite altering the key every day, their diplomatic messages were being understood and acted upon. Speed was also essential, because the code had to be cracked before it changed if a U-boat attack or an air-raid were to be forestalled. To maintain security, the staff at Bletchley worked in small groups, aware only of their own immediate task. Many thousands of these men and women died without breaking their oaths of confidentiality, never revealing that the British, not the Americans, should have been credited with the world’s first digital computer. By the end of the war, ten electronic Colossus machines were churning through intercepted texts, rapidly comparing them with vast numbers of letter patterns until a similarity happened to crop up that suggested a route into the day’s concealed code. This task was only feasible because each Colossus could make choices. Instead of mindlessly trawling through every single possibility, it eliminated countless cul-de-sacs at one fell swoop, either by following preset instructions or by pausing to ask a human operator for help. Although far less adaptable than modern computers. Colossus was different from ENIAC because it made decisions.The entire base functioned like a giant information processing machine, taking in garbled messages and generating intelligible details of German plans. Inside, its human, mechanical, and electronic components interacted with each other by following instructions. Unknown to many of the people there, the world’s mathematical expert on decision-making—Alan Turing—worked at Bletchley Park. Nowadays, Turing is celebrated as the founder of our modern information society, in which power and money rely on controlling global communication; yet his own life and reputation were shadowed by the need for silence. In addition to the secrecy surrounding much of his work, he behaved covertly to conceal his homosexual activities, then still illegal. After being forced to confess during a public trial, Turing was sub¬ jected to a year’s experimental hormone therapy, and died in 1954 from eating a poisoned apple. Regarded in his lifetime as obscure, eccentric, and a potential traitor vulnerable to blackmail,Turing has now been transformed into a tragic gay icon, an information guru who patriotically confounded German security.

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Pledged to secrecy, Turing and his colleagues remained quiet about their war¬ time activities, and the earliest programmable computers were invented in igno¬ rance of their research. Nevertheless, Turing was enormously influential because he thought not only about the technology that makes computers work, but also about their significance. After the war, military and commercial organizations focused on building computers that were larger, faster, and more powerful, and— crucially—could be programmed to switch rapidly from one task to another. Turing posed fundamental questions about machine intelligence, drawing human minds and electronic circuitry ever closer. Ever since his closest friend died when he was a teenager, Turing had doubted the conventional Christian notion of a soul, an ethical conviction that he carried through into his machine philosophy. Resembling the biological determinists who were searching for life in compli¬ cated molecules, Turing believed that computers can think, even though they are made up of electronic circuitry. Thinking is, he agreed, hard to define—but whatever it is, Turing was convinced that computers and people both do it. Adopting Turing’s position meant establishing new visions of human beings as well as of machines. Computers were modelled on brains—or was it the other way round? Figure 55 asks ‘Can man build a superman?’, and indicates how electronic accessories might stand in for arms or eyes. The comparisons worked in two direc¬ tions. Whereas scientists initially enthused that circuits resembled super-fast neurons, soon they were saying that living nervous systems function just like electronic ones. In their visions of the human psyche, people reach decisions after signals have pulsed through a series of zigzag branching points, which act like electronic switches choos¬ ing between two paths. Typists were a favourite example: a secretary’s ears pick up sound waves from her boss’s dictation, and her body/brain decodes them into simple electronic signals which activate her fingers (computer wits extended the parallel by adding that she could reach into her memory store for cleaning up the grammar). In Turing’s visionary projects, real and conceptual experiences blended together. In the 1930s, before electronic computers became physically possible, he had invented an imaginary machine which received instructions by reading a long paper tape carrying sequences of marks and blank spaces; in principle, claimed Turing, his machine behaved as if it were a human being. By 1950, it seemed possible that this mathematical inspiration might coalesce into actuality (see Figure 55), and Turing took his analogy still further. Reflecting his familiarity with both code-breaking and sexual subterfuge, Turing first asked how someone could determine from printed answers whether an invisible respondent is male or female. And then he took another step in his imagined universe—could a ques¬ tioner distinguish between a person and a machine? This blurring of human—machine boundaries continued during the Cold War, when research into artificial intelligence was driven by government funding. At

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the same time as engineers were trying to make computers behave like people, psychologists were describing human brains as if they were electronic circuits. In an extension of the symbiotic techno-relationships developed at Bletchley Park, social structures were made compatible with computer systems, which were themselves designed as interactive extensions of human beings. To help military men dispatch orders to the electronic machinery enlisted under their command, programming languages became more and more like human ones; to improve the effectiveness of weaponry, computers were built that could analyse events at the same time as they were actually happening. As computer technology advanced at an explosive rate, these military applications were soon adopted for civilian use—running payroll systems, simulating delivery schedules, reducing production costs. And in the 1970s, when microcircuitry continued to shrink, manufacturers created yet another lucrative market by moving into private homes. Like many computer addicts, Turing was wildly optimistic about the future. By the end of the century, he predicted, the notion that machines think would be commonplace. Expert after expert made similar rash promises, lured by the stunningly rapid changes in electronic technology which were making computers smaller, faster, and cheaper. But although the Deep Blue computer beat the world chess champion in 1997, it adopted different tactics from any human opponent. Rather than computers becoming like human beings, humans were adapting to fit computer requirements, and physical reality was becoming less significant. Reallife wartime activities—firing missiles, supplying provisions, testing tactics—were simulated on massive computer systems, while people entertained themselves by waging pretend battles on their home screens, or watching films such as 2001 and Blade Runner, visionary tales of a near future in which computers reign or are indistinguishable from humans. By the end of the twentieth century, military training was taking place in the virtual realm, as pilots flew simulated bombers rather than risking their lives in real ones, and soldiers learnt safely online the techniques of hand-to-hand combat; conversely, civilian hackers could indulge in the pleasures of warfare by sending out viruses. Little surprise that for the Star Wars generation. Second Life can seem more familiar than everyday real life. Turing was not the only computer expert with utopian visions. During the 1960s, thirty years before the World Wide Web came into being, a Canadian media expert called Marshall McLuhan coined his neat aphorism that electronic tech¬ nology would recreate the world as a global village. While governments devel¬ oped computers as military prostheses, Californian gurus were campaigning for information to be freely shared amongst a virtual community based on equal access. In their electronic equivalent of‘Peace, not War’, computers would be dedicated to democratic government and universal education. First came the per¬ sonal computing industry, when calculating power was redistributed away from

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massive mainframes and into individual desktops. And next came the Internet, which caught on not because it was centrally planned, but because it was under everybody’s and nobody’s control. The dreams of Turing and the other information Utopians rest unfulfilled. The Web stretches around the globe, but the need to tap in electrically has widened rather than narrowed the gulfs between poor and rich. Information may be freely distributed, but much of it is worthless or even dangerous—online anonymity provides access to child pornography and terrorism manuals. And when every¬ thing is coded electronically, privacy disappears: in today’s computerized version of McLuhan’s global village, concealed cameras record people’s daily activities as effectively as inquisitive gossips hiding behind net curtains. Secrecy and warfare still pervade computing.

5

T(iyalry

Space isn’t remote at all. It’s only an hour away if your car could go straight upwards. —Fred Hoyle, Observer (1979)

B

y the end ofWorld War II, many scientists believed that life must exist else¬ where—after all, there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, so why

should planet Earth be unique? For Enrico Fermi, the Italian nuclear physicist who had helped to develop America’s atomic bomb, this argument contained a fatal flaw. How come, he asked, that we have found no evidence of any extrater¬ restrial beings? The obvious answer to Fermi’s question is that there are no such aliens, but in the aftermath of Hiroshima, a more sinister solution emerged: could the evolution of intelligence entail a built-in tendency towards self-destruction? During the Cold War, as nuclear reactors proliferated and international tensions rose, worldwide devastation seemed only too likely. Fermi’s paradox came to sym¬ bolize terrestrial geopolitics. This fear of global annihilation was reinforced by emphasizing that two super¬ powers were locked in head-on confrontation. The film Star Wars (1977) cast this period as a battle between good and evil, a struggle for survival between light and darkness, as if the entire world had been divided into two rival factions. Just as fiction and fact intermingled in utopian visions of artificial intelligence, so too, celluloid versions of cosmic conflict started to interact with earthly reality. When Ronald Reagan, America’s first Hollywood president, proposed building a gigantic missile shield out in space, its nickname became ‘Star Wars’. Never before had science been so blatantly enmeshed with politics. During the Cold War, research programmes that seemed scientific were also being driven by struggles for power. All around the globe, governments jockeyed for position, investing huge portions of their annual budgets into two key areas—space flight and nuclear energy. In particular, the USA and the USSR used their scientific successes to win allies and consolidate their influence. Although they never did engage in nuclear conflict, they both conducted massive propaganda wars to ram

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Fig. 57

‘InTune

with the

Times. Africa!’ Yuri Gagarin salutes Africa from space. BOCTOK [Vostok] means THE EAST. The Morning of the Cosmic Era (1961).

home the political implications of their projects. As just one example, the Soviet cartoon of Figure 57 attacks the USA by not only advertising Russia’s techno¬ logical supremacy, but also appealing to developing nations. In 1961, when Yuri Gagarin became the first man to fly into space, his ship carried a potent name— Vostok, which means East. For Soviet citizens, spacecraft East symbolized their continued ascendancy over the West, a message designed to win support in Africa, Asia, and South America. They had already scored an early victory in the Cold War by launching Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. Gagarin’s flight seemed to confirm Russian claims that only communism could guaran¬ tee the progress needed for liberating the developing world from old-fashioned imperial oppression. Ironically, Sputnik was launched during a project intended to foster scientific cooperation, the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957—8. The IGY was a global enterprise on an unprecedented scale. Sixty-seven countries took part, and around 60,000 scientists spent billions of dollars investigating the Earth in its

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341

entirety—not only its surface features, but also its atmosphere and its oceans, its weather and its volcanoes, its shrouds of solar magnetism and cosmic radiation. To guarantee collaboration m the future, outer space and Antarctica were declared to be international laboratories. Originally conceived as the ultimate demonstration that scientific teamwork transcends political differences, by its end the IGY was celebrated for the vast additions that had been made to human knowledge. Governments pumped money into the IGY because they recognized that other interests were at stake. The geophysical research did increase scientific under¬ standing, but it also carried major commercial and military implications.The same international networks that monitored earthquakes could also detect underground bomb tests. Mapping large mineral deposits was scientifically valuable; financially, it was invaluable. Studying the poles yielded new biological and geological data; strategically, both the northern and southern polar regions are important for defence systems. Naval ships enabled oceanographers to create underwater maps, but their sonar equipment was vital for flushing out enemy submarines. Even predicting the weather suggested a new form of weaponry—seeding clouds to ruin crops, or fomenting storms to destroy cities. Most exciting of all was the prospect of venturing into space, made feasible by military research into rockets during World War II. Whereas scientists enthused about possibilities for exploring the Earth’s upper atmosphere, governments focused on political opportunities. But those aims became tangled together. The boundaries between scientific and military communities had already blurred, and during the IGY it became still harder to distinguish between their activities. For instance, space physicists announced that it would be an excellent idea to investi¬ gate the Earth’s outer belts of radiation by detonating hydrogen bombs hundreds of miles above the ground. In retrospect, it seems naive to have thought that this global experiment could escape becoming a military operation. Code-named project Argus, it was taken over by the US Army, who clamped down on inter¬ national discussions of the strange auroral lights being generated over the Pacific by their tests. When the findings were finally declassified, American scientists wriggled out of their obligations to exchange information by maintaining that ‘Argus was not an IGY program; it was a Department of Defense effort.’^ Sputnik and the other early satellites could be promoted as scientific instru¬ ments, but they were also Cold War inventions with the potential to carry out military observations. By the start of the space race, the old ideology of pure sci¬ ence had become untenable. Scientists may have persuaded themselves that they were accepting government funding in order to carry out their own research, but science had become militarized, and military politics had become scientific. Government policy was being directed by scientific possibilities; conversely, the type of knowledge that scientists produced was affected by political requirements.

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Decisions

This is not to say that the information produced by militarized science is wrong, just that it is different from what might otherwise have been produced. For exam¬ ple, international rivalry channelled funds towards surveillance techniques—Cold War politics demanded reconnaissance satellites and high-precision cameras. During the 1960s, the Earth was for the first time viewed from an external vant¬ age point, and images of the Earth as a sphere hanging in space came to dominate geophysical research, changing forever the way in which human beings regard their planetary home. As the propaganda campaigns intensified, Soviet scientists won the first round by sending Sputnik around the Earth. Soviet politicians also scored a diplo¬ matic coup, aggressively choosing an IGY reception at the Russian embassy in Washington for the announcement of their success. Sputnik’s American rival was still on the ground, and although its technological sophistication may have consoled scientists, coming in second did little for the nation’s reputation. One of the greatest impacts of the Sputnik project was to persuade the US government that it should pour money into its own programmes of education, defence, and scientific research, all geared towards the ultimate goal of reaching the Moon. To win over resisters who protested about the expense as well as the escalation of hostilities, government leaders emphasized the potential spin-offs from space research. Many of these were impossible to predict in advance, but they turned out to include not only robots and micro-electronic equipment, but also dried food, non-stick frying pans and no-fog ski goggles. US policy makers were set on a neck-to-neck race to the Moon that would boost national pride and deflect attention away from less attractive policies, such as the Vietnam War. For chauvinistic Americans, the main point of aiming for the Moon was to get there before anyone else. From their perspective, the race started badly. Under starter’s orders from President Khruschev, scientists in the Soviet Union aspired to maintain their lead, and they scored several more firsts in close succession—their unmanned probe reached the Moon, Russian dogs beat American chimpanzees into space, and Gagarin went into orbit, soon followed by a Soviet woman. But then their pace slowed down. After several launches went disastrously wrong, Soviet rulers became reluctant to gamble so much money on a contest they might well lose. They had to weigh up the advantages of convincing poorer nations that communism was dedicated to technological improvement against the neglect suffered elsewhere as limited resources were funnelled into space flight. In the USA, critics were also appalled by the massive expenditure that took funds away from social programmes, but their calls for collaboration rather than competition were quashed. When two American astronauts reached the Moon m 1969, the government did its best to reap the maximum amount of publicity. Like Gagarin’s flight, the landing presented a welcome propaganda opportunity.

Decisions

Fig.

58

343

The USA Moon landing, 20 July 1969; Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E Aldin.

Photographs such as Figure 58 were beamed round the world, showing the Moon’s gravelly surface strangely shadowed and disturbed by footprints as the astro¬ nauts ventured away from their futuristic ship. The first lunar sentence was care¬ fully crafted in advance to present their achievement as a human rather than an American one—‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ Nevertheless, the stars and stripes often shown apparently fluttering in the breeze had been pre-manufactured in rigid material to compensate for the absence of an atmosphere. Similarly, although the plaque left behind by the lunar astronauts pro¬ claimed that ‘We came in peace for all mankind’, it was written only in English, and was generated by rivalry. Conducted in direct conflict with the USSR, the Moon project yielded military hardware such as spy satellites, communications networks, and defence systems. Despite the rhetoric, world peace seemed no nearer after that iconic landing. Competition not only continued, but also expanded, so that before the end of the century, several countries had launched their own satellites and were laying plans

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to reach out into the Solar System, a hitherto untapped zone for global rivalry. In these international battles for prestige, even smaller nations were willing to spend extravagantly for the sake of advertising their independence and their modernity. Individual governments embarked on their own nuclear programmes, nudging the globe nearer and nearer to destruction. As the French minister of defence put it in 1963,‘one is nuclear or one is negligible’.^ Like France, countries around the world began buying nuclear power in order to acquire political power. Previously, the devastation wreaked by the Americ’an bombs in Japan had brought a temporary near-halt to nuclear research. Many physicists had been so horrified by the outcome of their wartime work that they banded together into pressure groups, determined to spread information about the dangers of nuclear warfare and to disentangle themselves from military control. Nevertheless, others continued with defence work, fascinated by their atomic discoveries and convinced that building better bombs was essential for maintaining peace. In America, Edward Teller—a Jewish Hungarian emigre who had worked with Fermi during World War II—ignored his colleagues’ reservations, insisting that the explosive power of nuclear actions could be more effectively tapped by replicating some of the Sun’s activities. In the fission bombs dropped over Japan, energy had been released by splitting large atoms apart. Teller proposed making a more pow¬ erful weapon through fusion, by forcing very small atoms to bind together and release energy. After American surveillance revealed that Russia had embarked on making its own bomb, the government gave the go-ahead for Teller’s hydrogen super-bomb. US military scientists converted the South Pacific into a testing ground, deton¬ ating nuclear explosives whose effects on local islanders and Japanese fishermen were even more horrendous than anticipated. Determined to maintain their head-start and prevent other countries from building bombs, America imposed such tight restrictions on the distribution of radioactive materials that scientists abroad were unable to carry out experiments or develop medical therapies. Partly in response to this aggressive behaviour, other countries started setting up their own nuclear programmes, and warfare seemed ever more likely. To emphasize the risk of annihilating the entire human race, American physicists invented the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic timepiece whose face has no numbers but is set close to midnight. In response to political crises, the Clock’s minute hand nudges towards and away from its final vertical position. It was only two minutes short in 1953 when the super-powers tested thermonuclear devices, retreated to twelve when they signed a Test Ban Treaty in 1963, and then lurched back up to three in the 1980s during the American Star Wars project. The safety margin stretched to its widest in the 1990s as the Cold War ended, but then narrowed again as other countries started testing their own weapons.

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345

Global destruction seemed imminent—so why did it not happen? One answer is that deterrence, not attack, was the major goal. Displaying the ability to retaliate was needed to prevent anyone else from launching the first missile, so that in these battles of bluffs and counter-bluffs, nations assumed power by releasing enough information to make sure that they were seen to be testing. Other diplomatic strategies were also at play. Some nuclear power stations were acquired for show as much as for use. In India, for instance, nuclear reactors served similar political functions to hydroelectric dams and steel manufacturing plants—essential high-status technological installations intended to impress the nation’s citizens and celebrate their recent independence from British control. In addition, nuclear power was being promoted as an agent for peace rather than war. At the same time as American statesmen were sanctioning bomb trials over Bikini, they were also boasting how advances in nuclear physics would revolutionize agriculture, medicine, and industry. Atomic energy would, they promised, power the world. Yet even the peaceful applications of atomic energy were fraught with political machinations, and there was no uniform plan of development. Although the USA did relax its stringent controls and start disseminating nuclear products, this policy stemmed from tactical self-interest rather than scientific altruism. By dispensing atomic expertise, America could appear generous but also make more profit for its own industries and consolidate its global strength through building up blocs of allies. International power networks shifted as African and Asian countries pursued their own political objectives, forcing their way into inter¬ national discussions by trading on their nuclear capabilities and their uranium reserves. European nations also followed diverse agendas. For instance, Britain started to build nuclear power stations with great enthusiasm, but ground to a halt through a mixture of administrative muddle and growing awareness of the long¬ term dangers. Conversely, France followed Britain’s lead, but soon raced ahead to generate three-quarters of its electricity atomically. The power struggles of the Cold War made science itself into a political instrument. In diplomatic manoeuvres and commercial negotiations, scientific know-how provided a powerful lever for nations struggling to carve out their independence. As the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru declared, the bomb had demonstrated that economic and military strength ‘stem from science and if India is to progress and become a strong nation, second to none, we must build up our science.’Some poorer regions took advantage of their geographical location, converting themselves into indispensable sources of scientific data by building observatories high up unpolluted mountains or at unique equatorial sites. Wealthier ex-colonies—Australia, Canada—concentrated on building hightech research stations that operated without interference from either Britain or

346

Decisions

the USA. A more devious tactic was to boycott international projects—scientists could exert political pressure by refusing to collaborate with researchers from spe¬ cific countries. When the Cold War drew to a close, the head-on rivalry between the USA and the USSR faded away, but science was still generating the power that fuelled world politics.

6

Environment Praise without end the go-ahead zeal of whoever it was invented the wheel; but never a word for the poor soul’s sake that thought ahead, and invented the brake. —Howard Nemerov,‘To the Congress of the United States, Entering Its Third Century’ (1989)

W

hen the French explorer Tonis de Bougainville wandered round Tahiti in 1768, he enthused that ‘I was transported into the Garden of Eden; we

crossed a turf, covered by fine fruit trees, and intersected by little rivulets... every¬ where we found hospitality, ease, innocent joy, and every appearance of hap¬ piness.’^' Although European visitors soon corrupted this earthly paradise with technological gimmicks and sexually transmitted diseases, they continued to regard the Pacific region as an idyllic Arcadia. Current concerns about the survival of the planet have refuelled such romantic visions of a vanished golden age when natural harmony reigned, unthreatened by ozone holes or vanishing species. However, preserving the environmental purity of the past is not as straightfor¬ ward as it sounds. For one thing, much of nature is unnatural: scenes that seem eternal are man-made products. Britain, for example, was originally covered in dense woodland, and bore little resemblance to idealized versions such as that shown in Figure 59, a poster from World War II. This apparently timeless vista of large open fields was fashioned only in the eighteenth century, when wealthy landowners decided to make their farms more profitable by obliterating the small strips of land allocated to individual families. Far from being conservationists, these agricultural reformers overrode protests about decimating traditional village life in order to create the pastures that now characterize picture-book Britain. Safeguarding the environment might seem a universal ideal, but it is a political issue that has been adopted by very different factions. While this wartime propa¬ ganda was urging loyal Britons to fight for the sake of their imagined sun-bathed countryside, their enemies across the Channel (here just glimpsed in the distance)

Decisions

348

Fig.

59

‘Your Britain... Fight for it Now’. Wo rid War II poster by Frank Newbould.

were summoning up nature to back the Nazi cause. Adolf Fditler was a vegetar¬ ian whose regime reforested arable land, dispensed organic herbal medicines, and instigated research programmes into natural therapies. His right-hand aide Hermann Goering is now deplored for founding the Gestapo and the concentra¬ tion camps, but he was also a pioneer environmentalist. After Poland’s original woodlands were devastated by the German Occupation, Goering restocked its newly created parks with the animals that had once been native, including a herd of superb bison (a potent Teutonic emblem) bred according to the most recent techniques of post-Darwinian eugenicists. Despite the genocidal campaigns he launched against human beings, Goering insisted that this primeval forest was a sacred grove whose animal inhabitants should remain untouched. Nature often looks better when it is artificial. That is why the gardener Capability Brown fabricated tranquil English landscapes by digging lakes, planting trees, and moving whole villages—including their inhabitants. The naturalist John Muir was enraptured by the serene Californian meadowlands he visited, but he chose to ignore the influence of Native American farmers who had been fire¬ clearing the original forest for centuries. The artist James Audubon made a small fortune by selling exotic pictures of birds, carefully crafting them in his studio to symbolize American values of strength and freedom as they soared against painted

Decisions

349

backdrops of remote mountains. Yet Audubon was no conservationist, but a keen huntsman who obsessively tracked down the rarities he needed to complete his collection, not caring about the risks of extinguishing threatened species. The appeal of wild nature is relatively recent. For millennia, wilderness was something to push back and overcome as people struggled to carve out a com¬ fortable existence from their hostile surroundings. Survival depended on tam¬ ing nature, so that barren mountains and dense forests were regarded as suitable for social outcasts, for sinners banished from God’s Garden of Eden. Such harsh domains started to become fashionable only a couple of hundred years ago. As the products of civilization started to seem less attractive. Romantic travellers described how they reached states of near-religious ecstasy through contemplating the sub¬ lime beauty ot precipitous gorges or gloomy cathedral-like groves. After ventur¬ ing overseas to other continents, they recounted that they had voyaged back in time, encountering primitive societies where life was easier and purer. This double yearning for the sublime and the primitive manifested itself par¬ ticularly strongly in the USA. During the nineteenth century. Romantic writers envisaged pioneers steadily pushing back the frontier between the wild and the civilized as they moved ever westwards. This triumphant vision was marred by nostalgic regrets that Americans were losing contact with their immigrant ori¬ gins as progress obliterated the authentic experiences of the first rugged settlers. To resolve this sentimental dilemma, enterprising naturalists established national parks with a double purpose—to provide sanctuaries for refugees from successful capitalism, and to stand as monuments to America’s pioneering spirit. Most famously, Muir—originally a farmer born in Scotland, nowadays cele¬ brated as the founding father of environmentalism—set about converting Yosemite into a man-made wilderness zone. He intended his national park to appear primal, even though it had never before existed as he designed it. Apparently oblivious to the inherent ironies of their mission, Muir and his contemporaries worked with biblical zeal, aiming not to simulate the grim realities of frontier survival, but instead to resurrect the original Garden of Eden. But manufacturing uninhabited glades of harmony meant forcibly clearing out the indigenous residents, many of whom were slaughtered or subjected to misery m reservations.To guarantee safe access and stop nature from ruining the carefully selected views, conservationists constructed discreetly camouflaged tracks and embarked on continuous mainten¬ ance programmes. Restoring an imagined natural past has always been an expensive business. It also entails interference and oppression—ejecting American Indians from Yosemite, ripping out family strip-farms to make enclosures, relocating vil¬ lages. Nowadays, privileged eco-tourists who live in cities campaign to preserve endangered species and keep vast tracts of untamed nature as retreats from urban

350

Decisions

pressures. Maintaining biodiversity may seem a more worthwhile and more sci¬ entific ideal than Muir’s bid for an original terrestrial paradise. Nevertheless, just as inYosemite, establishing uninhabited wilderness has entailed evicting the local inhabitants. In the interests of preservation, many victims of involuntary resettle¬ ment—Thai, Kenyans, Amazonian Indians—have become conservation refugees confined to shabby squatter camps. The central paradox is that people are themselves part of nature. In 1964, American conservation law defined wilderness as a place ‘where man hirhself is a visitor who does not remain’—but if people are excluded from nature, then it is intrinsically artificial. In Figure 59, the man blends into the countryside, as much a part of England’s natural inheritance as the trees and the animals. Striding through the gentle scenery of rounded hills, this lone shepherd marshals his flock of sheep, an image replete with Christian symbolism. In the Bible, God gave human beings a dual responsibility—to be the world’s custodians, but also to exploit it for their own benefit. This mixed message still dogs environmental concerns. To express this conflict scientifically, the drive to conserve is at odds with the competitive struggle for survival entailed in human evolution. This Darwinian inheritance was interpreted in different ways during the second half of the nine¬ teenth century. Wealthy capitalists justified their cut-throat tactics through invok¬ ing the mantra coined by Darwin’s disciples—‘survival of the fittest’. Flowever, the very success of this ruthless formula prompted critics to focus on its flip-side of exploitation, and in Germany, a very different Darwinian champion appeared— Ernst Haeckel. While American environmentalists were attempting to resur¬ rect uncorrupted paradise, Haeckel was initiating a less oppressive, more holistic approach to biology that strongly influenced later environmentalist movements. The science of ecology was founded by Haeckel, who invented the word in 1866. Although it has now acquired a moral spin—ecological washing powder is virtuous as well as expensive—ecology started out as the study of the relation¬ ships between living creatures and their surroundings. Tike ‘economy’, it comes from the Greek word for a family household, and Haeckel suggested that all the Earth’s organisms coexist as a single integrated unit, competing against each other but also offering mutual aid. According to Haeckel’s version of Darwinian evolu¬ tion, if people are to flourish, then they should respect the laws of this universal system instead of trying to dominate it. This non-exploitative approach appealed to Haeckel’s disciples, especially in Germany, where their mystical philosophies tried to restore a spiritual dimension to the physical universe. Physicists were also becoming increasingly concerned about the Earth’s future. As they tried to make factory equipment more efficient (and hence more profit¬ able), they formulated the laws of thermodynamics, which state mathematically that unless there is some input from outside, the total amount of energ}^ available

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351

for use must inevitably diminish. When they started to think about the Universe itself as one massive self-contained machine, scientists realized with alarm that it could grind to a halt. In the worst-case scenario, everything would be uniformly cold, and information would cease to flow—put more technically, the disorder of entropy would have reached a maximum. To slow down the pace of deterioration and safeguard the future, physicists campaigned for waste to be reduced and for non-renewable resources to be conserved. During the first half of the twentieth century, ecologists synthesized these bio¬ logical and physical approaches to create a revised vision of nature as a grand eco¬ nomic machine. Borrowing from the language of industry, they invented a new ecological vocabulary. They started talking about food chains with roots in the humblest of Earth’s factory workers—bacteria and plants—that lead up through networks of animal producers to reach human beings, the highest level consum¬ ers. They reconceived energy as an agent of exchange, the natural equivalent of the currency driving human economies, and they replaced collaborative com¬ munities of living organisms with ecosystems, in which plants buy in solar energy and repackage it to be stored up for later availability. Such concepts have become everyday terms m global politics, but they originated in ecologists’ micro-studies of Thames-side woods and Illinois cornfields. Once the world had been visualized as a machine, then it seemed right—nat¬ ural even—for human beings to intervene and make it run more effectively. One approach was to increase nature’s productivity through technological manipu¬ lation. Engineers constructed dams and irrigation schemes, while agricultural experts turned to the chemical industry for help, producing pesticides that enabled farmers to boost their bank balances through increasing their yields. Yet before long, ecologically minded scientists were carrying out research projects which highlighted the knock-on effects of wiping out crop-eating insects, or the risks of flooding some areas to leave others deprived of water. They used these results to emphasize the dangers of short-term policies that converted nature into a set of high-performance components racing at maximum output. These early protests appeared mainly in academic articles, but they achieved a far greater impact when objectors went public. The environment became a major issue not only because scientific attitudes were altering, but also because the media were expanding—especially television, the brand-new publicity opportunity which became virtually universal during the last third of the twen¬ tieth century. Scientists in many disciplines grasped the opportunity to promote themselves to wide attentive audiences, and esoteric topics—black holes, genetic decoding, chaos theory—became familiar (at a superficial level, anyway) through documentaries and magazine articles. Yet the influence worked both ways. This public exposure made scientists more vulnerable to criticism, so that their plans

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and aspirations became subjected to new constraints. Researchers realized that in order to gain financial backing, they needed not only to prove a project’s scientific validity, but also to demonstrate its political, commercial, or ethical significance. Gradually, they learnt how to manipulate the media and secure funding through making overblown pronouncements of revolutionary breakthroughs or impending catastrophes. The early debates about running planet Earth were sparked off by Rachel Carson, a marine biologist who worked for the US government. In 1962, she published Silent Spring, a title designed to evoke a potentially near future when all the world’s birds have been killed off by toxic chemicals. Carson wrote poetically, but she had compiled her facts thoroughly and she made the scientific arguments easy to follow. She also appreciated the power of bluntness.‘For the first time in the history of the world,’ Carson warned her readers,‘every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death’. Silent Spring made a huge impact. As well as its horror stories about carcinogenic sprays, poisoned reservoirs, and falling birth-rates, the book’s critiques resonated with wider Cold War concerns about the twinned power of science and the state. In line with other protest movements of the 1960s, Carson called for citizens to exert more control over their own destiny. An American civil servant, she wrote with an insider’s authority when she attacked politicians’ failure to challenge the conclusions of self-interested scientists. As Carson explained, the governments that allowed the atmosphere to be polluted with DDT were also sanctioning nuclear programmes generating invisible radiation. Unsurprisingly, political and industrial leaders joined forces to disparage this presumptuous woman who had dared to criticize the establishment by presenting scientific information in a demystified form that everyone could understand. Campaigns to protect the environment became linked with opposition to con¬ ventional government. In Germany, for instance, the Green Party was a powerful political force in the 1970s, despite embarrassing historical associations with the Nazi Party’s support of back-to-nature movements. More generally, disillusion¬ ment with state-run science forced researchers to recognize the importance of gaining public approval as well as official backing for their projects. By the 1970s, debates about the environment were being conducted in the press and on televi¬ sion. For example, James Lovelock, a chemist specializing in pollution, gained huge publicity for his Gaia hypothesis, even though it was panned by ortho¬ dox scientists. In his interactive model. Lovelock imagined the Earth as a giant self-regulating system, a quasi-organic being who can protect herself against the damage induced by human beings. Evocatively wrapped in spiritual packaging. Lovelock’s holistic alternative to materialistic science and its technological prod¬ ucts gained enormous popular support.

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In contrast, most scientists preferred to pursue the centuries-old mechanical approach that had previously brought them so much success—splitting up the world into smaller components which can be tackled separately.That methodology of breaking down a problem into manageable pieces had worked extremely well inside laboratories, but proved less effective when dealing with global phenomena. Take the weather. Meteorologists realized that analysing the atmosphere as separate orderly units was of little help, because even the slightest perturbation could thwart their logical predictions. Chaos reigned, they concluded, so that—m the mediasavvy summary—a butterfly flapping its wings m Brazil might appear to cause a tornado m Texas. To cope with this unwanted noise, climatologists applied brute computing force, an option newly available in the 1970s.Yet although they devised ever more complex programs to simulate the atmosphere’s behaviour, bigger did not necessarily become better—the digitized models became over-burdened with refinements and riddled with undetectable errors. As critics pointed out, once their virtual structure approached that of the Earth itself, they would become as cumbersome as reality. For environmentalists, the most effective way of garnering public support and winning government money was to predict catastrophe. One NASA scientist explained frankly to his television listeners, ‘It’s easier to get funding if you can show some evidence for impending climate disasters...science benefits from scary scenarios.’During the 1970s, climate experts were adamant that another ice age was looming—they insisted that statistical analyses of historical data proved that the globe would once again freeze over into inaction. Twenty years later, that icy vision of the future had been displaced by global warming. According to the lat¬ est interpretation, the effects generated by two centuries of industrialization are over-riding natural variations in the Earth’s climate. By the end of the twentieth century, the debates about global warming had become vitriolic as accusations of vested interests escalated. Experts argued about the relative merits of differ¬ ent specialized techniques, but at the same time, motives were being weighed up alongside facts. Non-scientists wanted to behave like global citizens who cared about the future, but they had become suspicious of scientific pronouncements laden with conflicting conclusions and bitter denunciations. Over the past fifty years, media-sensitive scientists have learnt that the best way of attracting public attention and government funding is to deliver apocalyptic prognoses—nuclear devastation, meteoric bombardment, an impending ice age, global warming. Modern scientific forecasters seem to fulfil the same psycho¬ logical needs as religious prophets who preached that the end of the world represents God’s punishment of the sinful. In that sense, global warming is more rewarding than an ice age because blame can be assigned to the human race. In contrast with natural disasters, the greenhouse effect and the thinning of the ozone

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layer are attributed to the industrial activities that drive modern profit-based capit¬ alism. Following this rhetoric, people may be guilty of destroying the world on which they depend, but scientists are offering them the possibility of redemption through altering their behaviour. By enlisting public cooperation to think green and rescue the environment, scientists convert themselves from agents of destruc¬ tion into secular saviours.

7

Tutures

But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near: And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. —Andrew Marvell, ‘To his coy mistress’ (i68i)

P

redicting the future is a hazardous business. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Western Union rejected telephones as useless and Lord Kelvin pro¬

nounced that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible. Their misplaced caution was, however, trumped by the chairman of IBM, who in 1943 envisaged a world market for five computers. In contrast, technological prophets have— unsurprisingly—more often been over-optimistic about the possibilities opened up by new inventions. When the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was an Oxford under¬ graduate, he enthused that electricity would keep poor people warm all winter while balloons glided silently over Africa to map its interior and annihilate slavery for ever. Like so many utopian visionaries, Shelley had not yet learnt that technical feasibility alone is not enough—political motivation is also essential. Improving the future has been a scientific ideal for the past three hundred years. Progress first became a key leitmotif during the Enlightenment, when reformers declared that the best way forwards was to encourage science. Ever since then, sci¬ entific enthusiasts have repeatedly promised that investing in research would make a country richer and help its citizens live better. And they were right; if anything, they underestimated the extent to which science would transform society and dominate the globe. Although the future is unknowable, many further improve¬ ments can be forecast with confidence—new drugs will appear, the Internet will become more versatile, genetic techniques will improve, computers will get even cheaper, smaller, and all-pervasive. For people in the right places, life has become longer and more comfortable than it used to be, and will continue do so. But in some parts of the world, conditions have deteriorated. Futurologists pre¬ dict that technology is bound to continue on its upward curve, carried on by its

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Decisions

own momentum. Similarly, some downward trends have also got to a point where they are hard to reverse. Natural resources will become even scarcer, infectious diseases will proliferate, and overcrowding in urban slums will soar still higher.The net outcome of scientific innovation has apparently been to widen the division between rich and poor, not reduce it. Now that scientific research is so tightly tied together with political interests, deciding how to tackle disparities is a global issue in which all the world’s citizens have a stake. Time after time, technophiles have predicted that one or another new inven¬ tion would change human behaviour and revolutionize society. During the past couple of centuries, the world effectively shrunk as first trains and ships, then tele¬ phones and radio, and now the Internet have successively made it easier for people to communicate with one another. Yet despite the hopes that readier contact would bring closer understanding, world peace is no nearer. The opposite tech¬ nological route to global harmony—increasingly powerful weapons for cowing enemies into submission—has proved equally ineffective. Another social benefit that has been repeatedly claimed for technical innovation is equality. According to this line of argument, new inventions liberate oppressed groups. At various times in the past, technological optimists have predicted that textile workers would benefit from factory automation, that women would be emancipated by washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and that racial discrimination would vanish in the age of computers. If only. One way of predicting the future is to plot the number of inventions that appear each year, and then extrapolate forwards. However, to concentrate exclusively on dates can be a misleading way of mapping technological progress. Another way of thinking about it is to consider how many people are using different pieces of technology: take-up may reveal more than novelty. Looking back over the past, it is clear that even the most successful inventions have not necessarily eliminated older ones, many of which have continued to stay in use or even gained strength. The American horse population went on expanding long after cars were being mass produced, because animals were needed to power agricultural equipment. Although bombs, poison gas, and other outstanding military innovations of the twentieth century were heavily publicized, in terms of effectiveness—numbers killed—guns scored higher. Now, unlike thirty years ago, twice as many bicycles as motor cars are being manufactured every year. During the twentieth century, governments increasingly encouraged their citi¬ zens to pin hopes for the future on science and technology. But when it arrived, the future did not always conform to expectations. DDT boosted agricultural production but decimated the countryside, nuclear reactors conserved coal but accidents unleashed radiation, and the Internet promised democratic access but enabled pornography to flourish. In medicine, the single most acclaimed invention

Decisions

357

was penicillin, converted into a usable drug during World War II to save the lives of wounded soldiers. Fifty years later, hospitals were plagued by resistant bacteria, and in the USA, half the antibiotics being manufactured were going into animal food as growth promoters. Nevertheless, science’s undoubted successes make it the best prospect for cre¬ ating a better future. After World War II, when the industrialized nations banded together to remedy world poverty, they recommended science as the obvious cure, and set in place development schemes that aimed to bring the poorer parts of the world up to the same technological level as their own. Although in many ways enormously successful, these projects were not as disinterested as they might seem, but were permeated with political interests. By distributing the benefits of their industrial expertise around the globe, rich and powerful nations reinforced their power. Spreading science reinforced supremacy, so that philanthropic devel¬ opment programmes were also a disguised form of imperialism. Scientific politics went global during the Cold War, when a new international player appeared on the scene—the Third World, a term invented in 1952. While the western bloc of North America and Europe was pitted against the Sovietdominated East, there was also a conflict between the ‘North’ and the ‘South’. These inverted commas are a short-hand way of indicating that the globe can be metaphorically divided in two—the wealthy industrialized powers (originally in north-west Europe, but now including Australia) were competing to win the allegiance of the poorer Third World nations, many of which (but not all) lay in the southern hemisphere. As illustrated by Figure 57 (Gagarin’s Russian space-ship flying over Africa), technological assistance was one of the major bribes on offer. In these asymmetrical ‘North—South’ interactions, scientific help came with a political price tag. Although less visible during the Cold War, these ‘North—South’ interactions were in many ways just as important as the East—West hostilities. ‘Northern’ wealth ensured the dominance of the scientific and technological styles of dealing with the world that had proved so successful for industrialized nations. Such scientific-centrism is insidious because it organizes the entire globe in its own image. The problem is not so much that it ignores other ways of think¬ ing, but that it makes it impossible to think m any other way. The upside-down Australian map at the beginning of this book (Figure i) was designed to protest against narrow assumptions that the European perspective is the only one possible. More generally, it reveals the arrogance underpinning not only terrestrial geog¬ raphy, but also Northern views of knowledge and beliefs in general. The very concept of development implies not only that modern science and technology are intrinsically superior, but also that the ‘North’ knows best. Intrinsically flawed, development strategies for improving the future failed to iron out scientific inequalities. Distributing high-tech scientific apparatus to Third

358

Decisions

World nations made the powerful donor look good, but was not necessarily the best solution for poverty. Accepting such gifts entailed political subordination and imposed modernity on people who did not necessarily want it. For exam¬ ple, Colombia and Paraguay agreed to receive a US nuclear reactor not because they needed to generate energy or detonate a bomb, but because they wished to display their political loyalty. Instead of developing, many poor nations became poorer, or even destitute, during the second half of the twentieth century. Development projects pushed Third World countries into a state of scien¬ tific dependency, in which they were obliged to rely on equipment produced by ‘Northern’ industrialized nations. They were denied the possibility of scien¬ tific equality, because the only research projects set up within poorer countries were dedicated to technological applications carrying an immediate social benefit. However generous the donations, they were dedicated to alleviating poverty, not to creating rival research centres. Abstract theoretical investigations, the highstatus aspect of science, remained the privilege of rich countries, who objected to directing funds away from their own institutions. Educational projects did encourage children in poorer nations to study science, but if they wanted to pursue a career as a professional scientist, they were forced to emigrate. Scientific research became a luxury that the Third World could not afford. Scientific development programmes were designed to help the Third World catch up with the industrialized ‘North’. However, instead of the world’s countries drawing closer together, they headed off in different directions, rather like evolv¬ ing species who irrevocably diverge. The poorer nations were not simply passive recipients of ‘Northern’ methods and equipment, but instead adapted what they were given to carve out their own technological routes towards the future. Rather than importing modern cars or motorbikes, people devised their own means of transport to fit local conditions—cycle rickshaws in India and Singapore, boats driven by borrowed irrigation pumps in Bangladesh.The massive shanty towns of Africa and Asia seem uninhabitable when viewed from the outside, but they man¬ age to function because local inventors have produced new versions of existing materials such as corrugated iron, now relatively unusual in ‘Northern’ nations, and asbestos-cement, banned elsewhere on safety grounds. Decisions about using science and technology carried great political impli¬ cations. In several countries, manufacturers retained hand-operated tools which were labour intensive—sewing machines, for instance—in preference to building expensive factories relying on foreign automated equipment. Technological and political power are bonded together. As Mahatma Gandhi put it, he hoped to reject mass production m favour of production by the masses, and the Indian flag now features a spinning wheel to symbolize independence from industrial Britain. Towards the end of the twentieth century, this reliance on individual activity

Decisions

359

enabled Indian computer programmers to undercut American ones—and because of this skilled labour force, India started to emerge as an international political force to be reckoned with. The most ambitious scientific development project became known as the Green Revolution. In the mid-1960s, governments and international organiza¬ tions decided to tackle world poverty by transforming global agriculture.To elim¬ inate starvation and increase food output in heavily populated areas, they started replacing traditional methods with the latest scientific techniques. These eco¬ nomic philanthropists promised that by adopting science-based agriculture,Third World nations would be able to support themselves, or even make a financial profit by exporting tropical fruit and vegetables to ‘Northern’ countries. In add¬ ition to introducing chemical fertilizers and industrial irrigation schemes, within a few years scientists were disseminating seeds that had been genetically engineered by the new specialists of biotechnology. Genetic engineering initially sounded like a contradiction in terms, because it metaphorically brought together two disciplines that had previously been placed at opposite ends of a spectrum ranging from the hard masculine sciences to the soft feminine ones. Biologists associated themselves with industrialists by adopting mechanical terms such as splicing and cutting to describe how they were explor¬ ing the double helix of DNA through manipulating its chemical groups. Genetic modification was not in itself new. The opening chapters of Charles Darwin’s book on evolution describe how farmers and pigeon breeders used selective breeding to style cattle and birds for carrying out particular tasks. In contrast, the new biotechnologists alter genes from the inside. And like manufacturing entre¬ preneurs, they have set up commercial companies to market products derived from the natural world. At first, scientific remedies for global poverty seemed to be working splen¬ didly. By 1980, India had become self-sufficient in wheat and rice, while several other areas of the world were reporting record harvests. Science was apparently living up to its reputation of providing a miracle recipe to guarantee prosperity. Nevertheless, the Green Revolution was already under heavy attack from dis¬ illusioned critics. Many sceptics focused on the environmental damage caused by this unprecedented transfer of plants from one part of the world to another, which generated all sorts of unanticipated consequences. Powerful chemicals were being introduced to improve the barren soil or cope with tropical pests, and their deleterious effects rippled out along food chains. Water diversion projects altered existing drainage systems, so that although some places benefited from bumper yields, others experienced droughts. Genetic modification came under particularly heavy fire. On the plus side, plants that had been specially engineered to cope with local conditions were

36o

Decisions

converting large tracts of barren land into high-yielding fertile fields. Yet as an unanticipated consequence, the survival of these artificially adapted plants meant that other species were dying out. Opponents emphasized the possibilities of some nightmarish scenarios. If crops are tailor-made to repel insect infestations, then cross-breeding might lead to resistant weeds, which could proliferate out of control. Or as another grim possibility, if one super-crop replaces thousands of different varieties, then it runs the risk of being wiped out if some super-predator should appear in the future. In Europe, although not in the USA, genetically modified (GM) products were denounced as ‘Frankenfoods’. In addition, the Green Revolution had adverse social consequences because its very makeup incorporated political power structures. Instead of importing food, poorer nations were now buying in the expensive chemicals, seeds, and expertise they needed to maintain their altered style of agriculture. Whereas the profits of large landowners with affluent contacts soared, small farmers were squeezed out of business and migrated to swell the urban slums still further. GM organisms were being produced in distant research laboratories, pouring ‘southwards’ from rich countries to poor ones—notably from North to South America. In contrast, financial benefits flowed in the opposite direction: the manipulated genes originated in local plants and were being drained ‘northwards’ to boost the profit and prestige of biotechnology companies. Development implies that poorer countries will be fast-tracked to achieve financial and scientific equality with their privileged helpers. But just as was happening with heavy industrial technology, the Green Revolution resulted in irreversible changes that increased divergence. All over the world, scientific research was being dedicated to modernizing agricultural techniques, but they became far more efficient far more quickly in wealthy countries, where governments could afford to protect their own producers against cheap imports. Whereas idealistic reformers once envisaged a rosy future in which poorer countries would feed the industrialized ‘North’, the reverse was taking place. For example, the USA started selling wheat to the USSR and exporting raw cotton to China, where newly established factories processed it into clothing suitable for rich Americans. Finding fault with science is relatively easy—the problem is deciding how to improve its impact. Reactionaries have always protested about declining stand¬ ards, insisting that the future can only get worse. Romantic technophobes lambast innovation and yearn after an imaginary ideal past, insisting that science has generated new means of destruction, not only by producing powerful bombs but also by becoming a political weapon in its own right. Writing on word-processors in the comfort of their centrally heated homes, they deploy selective vision to Ignore the countless ways in which scientific research has resulted in undeniable benefits.

Decisions

361

The problem is not that scientific technology is in itself bad, but that it can too easily become a tool for domination and coercion. Futuristic predictions abound of the technological marvels that lie ahead in the twenty-first century, such as nanotransponders (miniature brain implants designed to link human beings into global electronic networks), artificial genes, and fuel cells (tiny perpetual batteries based on chemical interactions). At the same time, environmentalists are issuing urgent warnings that the human race will pollute itself out of existence unless steps are taken now to prevent further global warming. Studying the past makes it clear that choosing a route towards the future is not just a matter of getting the scientific equations right, but also entails making worthwhile political decisions.

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Postscript

P

eople have always tried to make sense of the world about them. However, looking at the past makes it clear that there is no single correct way of

imposing order, even though earlier schemes can seem strange. Mediaeval Aristotelians saw three colours m the rainbow, whereas Newton split it into seven; before clockmakers started measuring out time in equal units, days and nights were divided into hours of varying length; and while many collectors arranged flowers according to their colours or leaves, Linnaeus classified them numerically by their reproductive organs. The system that you are brought up with is the one that seems obvious—any others feel intuitively wrong, however rationally they may have been constructed. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges highlighted this taxonomic dilemma by imagining a Chinese encyclopaedia that sorts animals into the following: (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included m this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (1) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

Although It might be possible to envisage real-life situations m which an indi¬ vidual category would be useful, this fictional list is rife with ambiguities and overlaps, and mocks the universality aimed at by scientific classifiers. Borges devised this parody for his enigmatic account of John Wilkins, a seven¬ teenth-century scholar who set out to create an international language by organ¬ izing the Universe into forty classes, each subdivided into smaller sets allocated their own identifying symbols. Once versed in his method, Wilkins argued, read¬ ers would be able not only to understand what a word meant but also to work out how the object or idea it represented fitted into the grand scheme of things. Which sounds fine—until you realize that, from a modern perspective, Wilkins s categories appear as unsatisfactory as those of Borges’s fictional encyclopaedia. For example, he has four types of stone—ordinary, precious, transparent, and insoluble.

364

Postscript

Should slate be slotted into ordinary or insoluble? Are sapphires transparent or precious? A system that seemed universally valid to Wilkins would be useless for modern mineralogists. Far from being an isolated crank, Wilkins was a leading light of the early Royal Society—he even chaired the meeting at which it was founded. Since Wilkins was a major player in formulating the Society’s experimental approach, he might be considered one of England’s first scientists. On the other hand, looking back, Wilkins refuses to fit any modern classification scheme. For one thing,-he was ordained, holding several church positions before eventually being consecrated Bishop of Chester. Furthermore, as well as working on his visionary philosoph¬ ical language, Wilkins dedicated himself to several projects nowadays not seen as legitimate science—perpetual motion, magical illusions, naval vocabulary, secret codes. As Borges concluded in his cautionary tale, all human schemes are provi¬ sional. Now that science dominates the world, it is hard to believe that only two hundred years ago, the word ‘scientist’ had not even been invented. Over the past few millennia, many peoples—Babylonians and Chinese, farmers and navigators, colonizers and slaves, miners and monks, Muslims and Christians, astrophysicists and biochemists—-have contributed towards building up our current understanding of the cosmos. Like human societies, knowledge is never definitively fixed, but is constantly changing as old categories dissolve and new ones coalesce. There can be no cast-iron guarantee that the cutting-edge science of today will not represent the discredited alchemy of tomorrow. Even so, one thing is certain: science has changed the Universe and its inhabitants forever.

Notes

These notes provide references for quotations only. Please see the section on Special Sources for additional information.

1

Origins I

SEVENS

1. Quoted in David Brown, Mesopotamian Planetary Astronomy-Astrology (Groningen: Styx, 2000), 151, 135 (with slight changes). 2

BABYLON

2. Quoted in Eleanor Robson. More than Metrology: Mathematics Education in an Old Babylonian Scribal School’, in John M. Steele and Annette Imhausen (eds). Under One Sky: Astronomy and Mathematics in the Ancient Near East (Munster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2002), 325-65, esp. 349-52. 5 LIFE

3. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 446—7 (book 111, ch. 6, section 12). 4. Charles Singer, Galen: On Anatomical Procedures (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 190. 6 MATTER

5. Democritus, Fragment 125. 7 TECHNOLOGY

6. Samuel Johnson, Preface, A Dictionary of the English Eanguage (1755), unpaginated.

366

Notes

II Interactions I EUROCENTRISM

1. Sir Robert Gorden Menzies, quoted in Sydney Morning Herald, 27 April 1939. 2

CHINA

2. Quoted in Nathan Sivin,‘Science in China’s Past’, in Leo A. Orleans (ed.), Science in Contemporary China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), 1—29, esp. 6. . 3. Quoted in Nathan Sivin,‘Shen Gua’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles C. Gillispie, 16 vols (NewYork: Scribner and Sons, 1970—80), xii.369—93, esp. 390. 4. Needham quoted in Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 314. 3

ISLAM

5. From The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (1879). 4 SCHOLARSHIP

6. Abu Yusuf Ya’qub ibn Ishaq Al-Kindi, quoted in David C. Eindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 bc to ad 14^0 (Chicago/Eondon: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 176. 7. Quoted ibid. 5 EUROPE

8. Roger Bacon, Opus Maius, quoted in David C. Eindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, 226. 9. David C. Eindberg, Roger Bacon’s Philosophy of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 5 (slightly altered from Eindberg’s translation). 6

ARISTOTLE

10. From Albert’s commentary on Aristotle’s DeAnima (On the Soul), quoted in Edward Grant, The Eoundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 164. 11. Sir Andrew Aguecheek and SirToby Belch, inWilliam Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, I.iii. 7

ALCHEMY

12. Roger Bacon, Excellent Discourse of the Admirable Force and Efficacie of Art and Nature, opening sentence quoted in Stanton J. Linden, The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 13.

Notes

III

367

Experiments

I EXPLORATION

1. Letter of 4 July 1471, quoted in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles C. GiUispie, 16 vols (NewYork; Scribner and Sons, 1970—80), xi.351. 2. Quoted in Paula Findlen,‘Inventing Nature: Commerce, Art, and Science in the Early Modern Cabinet of Curiosities’, in Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (eds). Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York/ London: Routledge, 2002), 297—323, 299 (Paris, 3 Feb. 1644). 2 MAGIC

3. John Maynard Keynes,‘Newton, the Man’, in The Royal Society Neivton Tercentenary Celebrations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), 27—34, esp. 27. 4. William Shakespeare, TheTempest, Lii.399—406. 5. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ILi.i66—7. 6. John Dee,‘Preface’, in The Elements of Geometrie of the Most Auncient Philosopher Euclide of Megara, trans. Henry Billingsley (London, 1570), cuts Aj and Aij. 3 ASTRONOMY

7. Quoted in Michael Hoskin (ed.). Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 119. 8. From the frontispiece of The Starry Messenger (1610), quoted in Mario Biagioli, Galileo, CourtienThe Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago/London: Chicago University Press, 1993), 103. 4 BODIES

9. William Harvey, The Circulation of the Blood and Other Writings, trans. Kenneth Franklin (London: Everyman, 1990), 46. 10. Ibid. 3. 11. John Aubrey, quoted in Andrew Weir’s introduction to ibid. p. xxv. 5 MACHINES

12. Quoted from L’Homme in Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes’s System of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 180. 13. Descartes’s response to Frans Burman, quoted in John Cottingham, Descartes (Oxford; Basil Blackwell, 1986), 120—i. 14. Robert Boyle, Notion of Nature, quoted in William B. Ashworth,‘Christianity and the Mechanistic Universe’, in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (eds). When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago/Eondon; University of Chicago Press, 1993), 61-84, esp. 79.

368

Notes

6

INSTRUMENTS

15. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 69 (Book I, Aphorism LXXXIV). 16. Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London, 1665), p. 4 of unpaginated Preface. 17. Ibid. 210-11. 18. Isaac Newton to Edmond Halley, letter, 20 June 1686, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H.WTurnbuU et ah, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959—77), ii.437. 7

GRAVITY

19. George Byron, Don Juan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 375 (Canto X, stanzas 1—2). 20. William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life, being some Account of his Family and Chiefly of the Junior Part of his Life, ed.A. Hastings White (London: Taylor and Francis, 1936), 20. 21. Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke, letter, 5 Feb. 1676, Correspondence, i.416. 22. Letter to Willian Derham, quoted in Stephen D. Snobelen,‘On Reading Isaac Newton’s Principia in the i8th Century’, Endeavours, 22 (1998), 159—63, esp. 159. 23. Letter to Caroline ofAnsbach, Nov. 1715, quoted in H. G. Alexander, The LeihnizClarke Correspondence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956), ii. 24. Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire, Letters on England, trans. L.Tancock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 68. 25. Stephen Hales, Vegetable Staticks, ed. M. A. Hoskin (London : Oldbourne, 1969), 147. 26. John Theophilus Desaguliers, The Newtonian System of the World, the Best Model of Government: An Allegorical Poem (London, 1728), 22—4. 27. Xavier Bichat quoted in Thomas S. Hall,‘On Biological Analogs of Newtonian Paradigms’, Philosophy of Science, 35 (1968), 6—27, esp. 6.

IV Institutions I

SOCIETIES

1. John Beale, quoted in Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 195. 2. Quoted in J. E. McClellan, Science Reorganised: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1985), 212. 3. Robert Walton, in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text (Oxford/NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1993), 7. 4. Quoted m Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement of the World’ (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2000), 104.

Notes

2

369

SYSTEMS

5. Both examples from Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 31. 6. Quoted in L. Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 22—3. 3

CAREERS

7. Lord Camden, quoted in William Cobbett (ed.). The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to theYear i8oj, vols 13—36 (London: Longman, 1812—20), xvii.999-1000 (1774). 8. Benjamin Martin, TheYoung Gentleman and Eady’s Philosophy, 2 vols (London:

1759-63), 1-3I99. Donald F. Bond, TIte Spectator, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), i.44 (12 March 1711). 10. Humphry Davy, The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. John Davy, 9 vols (London: Smith, Elder, 1839—40), ii.319 (1802 lecture on chemistry). 4 INDUSTRIES

11. David Miller,‘“Puffing Jamie”:The Commercial and Ideological Importance of Being a “Philosopher” in the Case of the Reputation of James Watt (1736—1819)’, History of Science, 38 (2000), 1—24, esp. 2. 12. Arthur Young, quoted from Annals of Agriculture (1785) in Francis D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (London: Paladin, 1968), 77. 13. Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (London: J. Johnson, 1774—7), vol. i, p. xiv. 14. Letter to Thomas Bentley, 1769, quoted in Neil McKendrick,‘Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline’, Historicalfournal, 4 (1961), 30—55, esp. 34. 15. James BosweU, quoted in Jenny Uglow, The Eunar Men:The Friends Who Made the Future, 1730—1810 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. xi. 16. Quoted in Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760—1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 147. 17. Erasmus Darwin, Loves of the Plants (London: J. Johnson, 1794), canto II, 11. 99—104. 18. Friedrich Engels, quoted in Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), 81. 5 REVOLUTIONS

19. LeTurc, 1794, quoted in Margaret Jacob, Scientifc Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (NewYork/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 165. 20. Davy, Collected Works, viii.iHi (1808 lecture on electro-chemical science). 21. Quoted from Max Planck, A Scientif c Autobiography (1949), in Gerard Holton, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 394.

370

Notes

6

RATIONALITY

22. Probably Augustus de Morgan, quoted in Charles Couston Gillispie, Pierre-Simon Laplace, iy4g-i82y:A Life in Exact Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 272. 7

DISCIPLINES

23. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813; Ware: Wordsworth, 1992), 22. 24. Adam Sedgwick, quoted in James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 405.

V

Laws

2 GLOBALIZATION

1. From Personal Narrative, quoted in Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes .'Travel Writing and Transculturation (London/NewYork: Routledge, 1992), 130. 2. William Thomson (1883), quoted in Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise, Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Eord Kelvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),

4553 OBJECTIVITY

3. Times Literary Supplement (17 March 1927), 167. 4. Two British doctors of 1867, quoted in Thomas L. Hankins and Robert Silverman, Instruments of the Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 138. 5. Gertrude M. Prescott,‘Faraday: Image of the Man and the Collector’, in David Gooding and Frank James (eds), Faraday Rediscovered: Essays on the Fife and Work of Michael Faraday, lygi—iSby (NewYork: Macmillan, 1985), 15—32, esp. 17. 6. William Farr, quoted in G. Gigerenzer et al. The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Fife (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 38. 4 GOD

7. Quoted in Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Fife (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 192. 8. Robert Chambers, quoted in Theodore Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820—igoo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 57. 9. James Hutton, quoted in David Goodman and Colin A. RusseU, The Rise of Scientific Europe 1300—1800 (Kent: Hodder and Stoughton, 1991), 291, 293. 10. Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘On a Piece of Chalk’ (1868), reproduced in Alan P Barr, The Major Prose of Thomas Henry Huxley (Athens, GA/London: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 154-73, esp. 156.

Notes

371

11. Alfred Tennyson, In Menioriam, in Poems, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, 1969), 909, 973 (sect. 54,1. 5; sect. 123,11. 1-4). 5 EVOLUTION

12. Letter, Charles Darwin to Charles LyeU, quoted in James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: Tiie Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship (^Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 431. 13. Charles Darwin, On The Origin of Species (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 396. 14. From Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871), 119, quoted in Evelyn Richards, ‘Redrawing the Boundaries: Darwinian Science and Victorian Women Intellectuals’, in Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 119—42. 6 POWER

15. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895; London: Pan, 1953), 94. 16. Pierre Duhem, quoted in I wan Rhys Morus, Wl^en Physics Became King (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), 85. 17. Hermann von Helmholtz,‘The Interaction of Natural Forces’, in Science and Culture: Popular and Physical Essays, ed. David Cahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 20. 18. Quoted in Zaheer Baber, The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilisation, and Colonial Rule in India (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 254. 7 TIME

19. Quoted in Simon Schaffer,‘Accurate Measurement is an English Science’, in M. Norton Wise (ed.), The Values of Precision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 135-72, esp. 136. 20. John Scott Haldane, quoted in Ronald Clark, Einstein:The Eife and Times (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973), 412.

VI Invisibles I

LIFE

1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford/NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1993), 38—9. 2. Quoted from Anthropogenie in Nick Hopwood,‘Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud: Ernst Haeckel’s Embryological Illustrations’, Isis, gj (2006), 260—301, esp. 291. 2

GERMS

3. Quoted in Fiona Haslam, From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine in Art in EighteenthCentury Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996), 236.

372

Notes

4. James Young-Simpson, quoted in John Waller, Fabulous Science: Fact and Fiction in the History of Scientific Discovery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 163. 5. Quoted in Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (London: Allen Lane, 1979), 7. 6. Mrs Alving in Act 2, in Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts, trans. Christopher Hampton (NewYork: Samuel French, 1983), 47. 3 RAYS

7. William Crookes,‘Spiritualism Viewed by the Light of Modern Science’, Quarterly Journal of Science, 7 (1870), 316—21, reprinted in Noel G. Coley andVance M. D. Hall (eds), Darwin to Einstein : Primary Sources on Science and Belief (Harlow: Longman/ Open University, 1980), 60—3, esp. 61. 8. Quoted in Iwan Rhys Morus, When Physics Became King (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), 186. 9. Quoted in John Waller, Fabulous Science: Fact and Fiction in the History of Scientifc Discovery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 43. 10. Quoted in Abraham Pais, Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World (Oxford/NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1986), 189. 11. Ernest Rutherford, The Newer Alchemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), 65.

4 PARTICLES 12. Stanford and Berkeley logbook of 1974, quoted in Peter Galison, How Experiments End (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), i. 5 GENES

13. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, quoted in Tim Lewens, Darwin (London/ New York: Routledge, 2007), 216. 14. James Barr,‘Some Eugenic Ideals’, in King Albert’s Book: A Tribute to the Belgian King and People from Representative Men and Women throughout the World, quoted in Nicholas Humphrey,‘History and Human Nature’, Prospect (Sept. 2006), 126. 15. A. N. Studitskii,‘Fly-Lovers—Man-Haters’, Ogonek (13 Mar. 1949), 14—16. I am very grateful to Simon Franklin for translating this article for me. 6 CHEMICALS

16. Karl Vogt, quoted in Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 329. 17. Anonymous claim of 1933, quoted in Nelly Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex Hormones (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), 93. 7 UNCERTAINTIES

18. Quoted from Why War? in Ronald Clark, Einstein:The Efe and Times (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973), 348.

Notes

373

VII Decisions I WARFARE

1. Bertrand Russell/Philosophy and Politics’, in Unpopular Essays (London: Allen and Unwin, 1950), 9-34, esp. 18. 2. Quoted in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (London: Penguin, 1986), 89. 3. Laura Fermi, Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1954), 173. 4. Otto Frisch, quoted in G. 1. Brown, Invisible Rays:The History of Radioactivity (Stroud: Sutton, 2002), 125. 2 HEREDITY 5. J. D.Watson and F. H. C. Crick,‘A Structure for Deoxy Ribose Nucleic Acid’, Nature, 171 (25 Apr. 1953), 737-8. 6. James D. Watson, The Double Helix (London: Penguin, 1997), 132.

3 COSMOLOGY

7. George Johnson, Miss Leavitt’s Stars:The Untold Story of the Woman Wlw Discovered How to Measure the Universe (New York: Norton, 2005), 108.

5

RIVALRY

8. Richard Porter,‘Introductory Remarks’,

of Geophysical Research, 64 (1959),

865-7. 9. Quoted in the editors’ introduction to John Krige and Kai-Henrik Barth (eds). Global Power Knowledge: Science and Technology in International A fairs (Chicago: Chicago Univesity Press, 2006), 5 (Osiris, vol. 21:‘Flistorical Perspectives on Science, Technology, and International Affairs’). 10. Quoted in Itty Abraham,‘The Ambivalence of Nuclear Histories’, in Krige and Barth (eds). Global Power Knowledge, 49—65, esp. 62. 6

ENVIRONMENT

11. Louis de Bougainville, quoted in Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989), 42. 12. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (London: Penguin, 1999), 31. 13. Roy Spencer, quoted in D. Jones, The Greenhouse Conspiracy (London: Channel 4, 1990), 24. POSTCRIPT

14. Jorge Luis Borges,‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins’, in Other Inquisitions 1937—^2, trans. Ruth Simms (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 108.

Photographic Acknowledgements (by figure number^

akg-images; 42; Musee Conde, Chantilly/akg-images: 2; Argonne National Laboratory, USA: 51; © S. Me Arthur/Artarom: l;The Art Archive: 7, 9, 13, 35; The British Library/ The Art Archive: 10; Ironbridge Gorge Museum/The Art Archive: 27; Courtesy of the Warden & Scholars of New College, Oxford/The Bridgeman Art Library: 21; The Science Museum/The Bridgeman Art Library: 32;Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA/The Bridgeman Art Library: 20; The British Museum: 26; Cambridge University Library: 24, 33, 34, 38; Bettmann/Corbis: 50; Derby Museums and Art Gallery:

22; Mary Evans Picture Library: 31, 36, 43; Courtesy of Roger Gaskell Rare Books: 11, 16;Time Life Pictures/Getty Images: 55; Sonia Halliday Photographs: 8; Oxford Science Archive/Heritage Image Partnership: 54; Nick Hopwood: 41; Imperial War Museum:

59; Institut International de Physique Solvay, Brussels: 49; © 1942 The Kosciuszko Foundation: 14; Leiden University Library: 6; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, pur¬ chase, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman Gift, in honour of Everett Fahy, 1977 (1977.10):

28; Museum of the History of Science, Oxford: 40; courtesy of NASA: 58; National Portrait Gallery, London: 48;The Royal Observatory, Edinburgh: 5;The Royal Society: 23,

29; The National Gallery/photo © 2005 Ann Ronan/HIP/Scala, Florence: 12; Science Photo Library: 53; Carl Anderson/Science Photo Library: 45; Antony Barrington-Brown/ Science Photo Library: 52; George Bernard/Science Photo Library: 44; University College London Library: 3; US Army Photo: 56;Wellcome Library, London: 30; Whipple Museum of the History of Science, University of Cambridge: 4

special Sources

As Science: A Four Thousand Year History is intended to provide an introductory overview of science’s past, I have not included the full academic apparatus of footnotes, although I have specified the origin of all my direct quotations. I am indebted to the work of many, many scholars, and a full reading list would be far too long. However, I express my special gratitude to the authors of the following books and articles, on which I leant particularly heavily.

Introduction I first saw the Australian map of the world in Jeremy Black, Maps and Politics (London: Reaktion, 1997).

Origins

1 I

SEVENS

I took several examples of special sevens from Annemarie Schimmel, The Mystery of Numbers (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 127—55. 2

BABYLON

I am indebted to Eleanor Robson for advice about ancient Babylon, and I relied greatly on her groundbreaking paper, ‘More than Metrology: Mathematics Education in an Old Babylonian Scribal School’, in John M. Steele and Annette

376

Special Sources

Imhausen (eds), Under One Sky: Astronomy and Mathematics in the Ancient Near East (Munster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2002), 325—65. My other major specialized sources were David Brown, Mesopotamian Planetary Astronomy-Astrology (Groningen: Styx, 2000) and Francesca Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscope, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 3-7

HEROES TO TECHNOLOGY

My major sources were the two classic books by Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd: Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970) and Greek Science after Aristotle (London: Chatto andWindus, 1973). I also used material from Andrew Gregory, Eureka! The Birth of Science (Duxford: Icon, 2001) and Serafma Cuomo, Pappus of Alexandria and the Mathematics of Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

II I

Interactions EUROCENTRISM

1 relied on three main sources: Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. 8—65; John M. Flobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. chs. i and 5; and Julia M. H. Smith, Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. Introduction and ch. 8. 2

CHINA

1 took my summary of Needham’s life and impact from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article by Gregory Blue, and also Francesca Bray, ‘Eloge of Joseph Needham’, Isis, 87 (1996), 312—17. My major guide around Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China was vol. 7.2, edited by Kenneth Robinson and with a valuable introduction by Mark Elvin. 1 relied heavily on two overviews by Nathan Sivin:‘Science in China’s Past’, in Leo A. Orleans (ed.). Science in Contemporary China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), 1—29; and ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Joseph Needham (ed.). Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 6.6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1—37 (this has a particular emphasis on medicine). For general analyses, 1 relied on Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 237—320; and John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 3. My account of Shen Gua is based mainly on Nathan Sivin,‘Shen Gua’, in Dictionary

Special Sources

377

of Scientific Biography, xii.369—93, which also provides an excellent survey of Chinese civilization around the eleventh century. I learned of Wang Ho from William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since AD 1000

(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 41. 3-4

ISLAM AND SCHOLARSHIP

My guiding text for representing an Islamic perspective was Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Science and Civilisation in Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). 1 also turned to Michael Hoskin (ed.). Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). For the Baghdad transla¬ tion project, 1 used Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society (London: Routledge, 1998). 5-6

EUROPE AND ARISTOTLE

My major standard sources were David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context,

600 BC

to

ad 14^,0

(Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1992);

and Edward Grant, The Eoundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). My examples of agricultural change came from John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 9. For the trade windows at Chartres, I relied on Jane Welch Williams, Bread, Wine, and Money: The Windows of the Trades at Chartres Cathedral (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1993). My understanding of mediaeval optics is taken mainly from chs. 3 and 4 of Dalibor Vqs Ay, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). My major sources for time and clocks were Jo Ellen Barnett, Timers Pendulum:The Quest to Capture Time—Prom Sundials to Atomic Clocks (New York/London: Plenum, 1998); David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1983); and Samuel Macey, Clocks and the Cosmos:Time in Western Eife and Thought (Hamden, CT:Archon Books, 1980). 7

ALCHEMY

For analyses, I relied mainly on two recent guides—Bruce T Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientfic Revolution (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2005), and the short introduction in Stanton J. Linden, The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). I also used William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University

378

Special Sources

Press, 1994), esp. 15—90, and W. F. Ryan and Charles B. Schmitt (eds), Pseudo-Aristotle The ‘Secret of Secrets': Sources and Influences (London: Warburg Institute, 1982).

m I

Experiments EXPLORATION

My major sources for printing, commodification, and communication were Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1996); and Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. 96—103 for Holbein, covered in detail in Susan Foister, AshokRoy, and Martin Wyld, Holbein's Ambassadors (London: National Gallery Publications, 1997), esp. 30—43.1 relied heavily on the following collections, which include some marvellous essays: Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (eds). Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York/ London: Routledge, 2002), esp. the editors’ Introduction, ch. i (Larry Silver and Pamela Smith, ‘The Powers of Nature and Art in the Age of Diirer’), ch. 2 (Pamela Long,‘Objects of Art/Objects of Nature’), and ch. 12 (Paula Findlen’s ‘Inventing Nature’ on cabinets of curiosity); N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (eds). Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. ch. 2 (William Ashworth, ‘Emblematic Natural History of the Renaissance’, the source of my comments on Gesner’s fox) and ch. 4 (Paula Findlen,‘Courting Nature’, on court natural history); Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (eds). Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), esp. the editors’ Introduction, ch. 5 (Daniela Bleichmar, ‘Books, Bodies and Fields’ on New World medicines in Europe), and ch. 12 (Judith Carney, ‘Out of Africa’ on rice and other exports). I also incorporated insights from Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 2

MAGIC

For The Tempest, I used Frank Kermode’s notes in the 1954 Arden edition, and also Frances A. Yates, Theatre of the World (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987); and Charles Nicholl, The Chemical Theatre (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). In addition to the seminal texts on Agrippan magic—Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964) and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979)—1 ^Iso relied on the essays by Brian Copenhaver and William Eamon in David C. Lindberg and Robert S.Westman, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For John Dee, I turned to Peter

Special Sources

J. French,

379

Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus (London: Roudedge and

Kegan Paul, 1972); and Nicholas H. Cluloo, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion (London/New York: Roudedge, 1988); 1 took the notion of his experimental lifestyle from the splendid article by Deborah E. Ffarkness,‘Managing an Experimental Household: The Dees of Mortlake and the Practice of Natural Philosophy’, Isis, 88 (1997), 247—62. For alchemy and Paracelsus, 1 mainly used Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy Chemistry and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2005). 3 ASTRONOMY For Copernicus’s strategies and influence, 1 referred mainly to Owen Gingerich, ‘The Copernican Quinquecentennial and its Predecessors: Historical Insights and National Agendas’, Osiris, 14 (1999), 37—60; and Robert Westman,‘Proof, Poetics, and Patronage: Copernicus’s Preface to De Revolutionibusf in D C. Lindberg and R. S. Westman (eds). Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 167—205. For the status of early modern astronomy, 1 used Westman’s‘The Astronomer’s Role in the Sixteenth Century: A Preliminary Study’, History of Science, 18 (1980), 105—47;

Nicholas Jardine,‘The Places ofAstronomy

in Early-Modern Culture , Journal for the History of Astronomy, 29 (1998), 49—62. The best discussion of Tycho Brahe’s iconography is in John Robert Christianson, On Tycho’s Island: Tycho Brahe and His Assistants, i^yo—1601 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2000). For Galileo, 1 turned to Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago/London: Chicago University Press, 1993); and David Lindberg,‘Galileo, the Church, and the Cosmos’, in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago/ London: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 4 BODIES My major source for Vesalius and Fabricius was Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997). ForVesalius’s artistic imagery, I turned to Pamela Long’s essay,‘Objects of Art/Objects of Nature’, in Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (eds). Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York/London: Roudedge, 2002); and also to ch. 5 of Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006). 5 MACHINES

1 took comments on time from Harold Cook,‘Time’s Bodies’, in Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (eds), Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York/London: Roudedge, 2002); and Rob lliffe, ‘The Masculine Birth of Time: Temporal Frameworks of Early Modern Natural

38o

Special Sources

Philosophy’, British Journal for the History of Science, 33 (2000), 427—53. For sci¬ entific aspects of Descartes’s thought, 1 relied on Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes’s System of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and William B. Ashworth,‘Christianity and the Mechanistic Universe’, in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (eds). When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 61—84. 6

INSTRUMENTS

1 based my analysis of instruments on Jim Bennett’s classic paper,‘The Mechanics: Philosophy and the Mechanical Philosophy’, History of Science, 24 (1986), 1—28. For Hooke, 1 drew particularly on Michael Dennis, ‘Graphic Understanding: Instruments and Interpretation in Robert Hooke’s Micrographm , Science in Context, 3 (1989), 309—64. For instruments as demonstration devices, 1 used Thomas T. Hankins and Robert Silverman, Instruments of the Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), and for Newton’s prism experiment, Simon Schaffer,‘Glass Works’, in David Gooding,Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (eds). The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 7

GRAVITY

All my sources are listed in the bibliography of my own Newton: The Making of Genius (London: Picador, 2002).

Institutions

IV I

SOCIETIES

For the early Royal Society, 1 referred to Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and for the Transit of Venus expeditions, to J. E. McClellan, Science Reorganised: Scientific Societies in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 1 based my analyses of Banks and imperialism on John Gascoigne, Josep/i Banks and the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Science in the Service of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement of the World’ (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2000). 2

SYSTEMS

1 took my account of John Ray from Anna Pavord, The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 372—94. My major source for Linnaeus was Lisbet Koerner, Einnaeus: Nature and Nation

special Sources

381

(Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1999). For the history of globalization, I was most influenced by C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World iy8o-igi4: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), esp. 1—83. I took the nutmeg debate from E. C. Spary,‘Of Nutmegs and Botanists’, in Linda Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (eds). Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), and the case of the hermaphrodite monkey from Anna Maerker, ‘The Tale of the Hermaphrodite Monkey: Classification, State Interests and Natural Historical Expertise between Museum and Court, 1791—4’, British Journal for the History of Science, 39 (2006), 29—47. For the arguments about race, I used David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century (London: Reaktion, 2002). 3

CAREERS

I took the concept of science’s intellectual class system from Bernice A. Carroll, ‘The Politics of “Originality”: Women and the Class System of the Intellect’, Journal of Women’s History, 2 (1990), 136—63. My analysis of Davy comes from Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760—1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and my ideas about Frankenstein and the new men of science originated with Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Melancholy Reflection: Constructing an Identity for Unveilers of Nature’, in Stephen Bann (ed.), Frankenstein Creation and Monstrosity (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 60-76. 4

INDUSTRIES

I took my ideas on Watt from Christine MacLeod, ‘James Watt, Heroic Invention and the Idea of the Industrial Revolution’, in Maxine Berg and Kristine Bruland (eds). Technological Revolutions in Europe: Historical Perspectives (Cheltenham/ Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 1998), 96—116; and from David Philip Miller, ‘“Puffing Jamie”: The Commercial and Ideological Importance of Being a “Philosopher” in the Case of the Reputation ofjames Watt (1736—1819)’, History of Science, 38 (2000), 1-24. My comments on Africa’s importance are based on Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 2002). The best book on the Lunar Society is Jenny Uglow, The Eunar Men:The Friends Who Made the Future, 1730—1810 (London: Faber and Faber, 2002). Darwin’s exclu¬ sion of workers and women from his poetry is analysed by Maureen McNeil, ‘The Scientific Muse: The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin’, in Ludmilla Jordanova (ed.). Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature (London: Free Association Books, 1986), 159-203; and by Janet Browne,‘Botany for Gentlemen:

382

Special Sources

Erasmus Darwin and The loves of the plants', Isis, 8o (1989), 593—620; I also used Deborah Valenze, The First IndustrialWoman (New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 5

REVOLUTIONS

For industrial chemistry, I relied mainly on Colin Russell, Science and Social Change lyoo—igoo (London: Macmillan, 1983), 96—135, but the best account of Enlightenment British chemistry, including Humphry Davy, is Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760—1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). As a biographical source for Lavoisier, 1 used Jean-Pierre Poirier, Lavoisier: Chemist, Biologist, Economist (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); for his career and iconography, the best analyses are by Marco Beretta, in his ‘Chemical Imagery and the Enlightenment of Matter’, in William R. Shea (ed.). Science and the Visual Image in the Enlightenment (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 2000), 57—88, and Imaging a Career in Science: The Iconography of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 2001). My account of William Lewis’s laboratory (Figure 29) is mostly from E W Gibbs,‘William Lewis, MB, FRS (1708—1781)’, Annals of Science, 8 (1952), 122-51. 6

RATIONALITY

My account of Laplace is based mainly on Robert Fox’s essay,‘Laplacian Physics’, from Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 4 (1974), 89—136, reprinted as ch. 18 ofR. C. Olby et al (eds). Companion to the History of Modern Science (London/New York: Routledge, 1990). The classic account of metrology is Kula Witold, Measures and Men (Princeton: Princeton University Press), and 1 am also indebted to Ken Alder’s works, especially The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey That Transformed theWorld (London: Little,Brown, 2002), and his article on French engin¬ eering in William Clark et al (eds). The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago/ London: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 7

DISCIPLINES

My original introduction to these ideas was Andrew Cunningham, ‘Getting the Game Right: Some Plain Words on the Identity and Invention of Science’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 19 (1988), 365—89. 1 took the controversy over ‘scientist’ from Sydney Ross,' Scientist: The Story of a Word’, Annals of Science, 18 (1962), 65—85, and also from Paul White, Thomas Huxley: Making the Man of Science' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. the Introduction and Conclusion. Two other major sources for this chapter were James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship ofVestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago/London: University of

special Sources

383

Chicago Press, 2000); and Martin Rudwick, The New Science of Geology (Ashgate: Variorum, 2004).

V I

Laws

PROGRESS

My major source for publishing and science in the nineteenth century was James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship ef Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), esp. 41—56, 515—32. My comments on the BAAS and method were based on RichardYeo,‘Scientific Method and the Image of Science 1831—1891’, in Roy MacLeod and Peter Collins (eds). The Parliament of Science: The British Association for the Advancement of Science i8ji-ig8i (Northwood, Middx: Science Reviews, 1981), 65—88. I originally came across the intellectual class system in Bernice A. Carroll, ‘The Politics of “Originality”: Women and the Class System of the InteWct’, fournal of Women’s History, 2 (1990), 136—63. The Manchester weavers are marvellously discussed in Anne Secord, ‘Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire’, History of Science, 32 (1994), 269—315; for Mary Anning, see Hugh Torrens, ‘Mary Anning (1799—1847) of Lyme:The Greatest Fossilist the World Ever Knew’, British fournal for the History of Science, 28 (1996), 257-84.The best biography of Mary Somerville is Kathryn A. Neeley, Mary Somerville: Science, Illumination, and the Female Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); the best accounts of her writing are in Collected Works of Mary Somerville, 9 vols, ed. and intro. James A. Secord (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004). 2

GLOBALIZATION

My major sources for Humboldt’s influential visions of the New World were Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London/New York: Rouledge, 1992), esp. 105—97;

Michael Dettelbach,‘Humboldtian Science’, in

N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (eds). Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 287-304; I also relied on Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (London: Reaktion, 2001), 31-56.The innovatory and now classic study of visual languages is Martin Rudwick, ‘The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science 1760—1840’, History of Science, 14 (1976), 149—95. An excellent review of British colonial science in the nineteenth century, with full references, is Mark Harrison, ‘Science and the British Empire’, Isis, 96 (2005), 56—63. The seminal study of early Victorian magnetism is John Cawood,‘The Magnetic Crusade: Science and Politics in Early Victorian Britain’, Isis, 70 (1979), 493—518.

384

Special Sources

For telegraphy from a British perspective, 1 used Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 194—230; and for its imperial aspects, the excellent account in Bruce Hunt,‘Doing Science in a Global Empire’, in Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context (Chicago/London: Chicago University Press, 1997), 312—33. The best source for Thomson and telegraphy is Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise, Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 445—94, 649—83. 3

•

OBJECTIVITY

The classic article on objective representation in the nineteenth century is Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison,‘The Image of Objectivity’, Representations, 40 (1992), 81—128. For instruments and problems of deciphering, I relied on Thomas L. Hankins and Robert Silverman, Instruments of the Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 113-47; and Peter Galison,‘Judgement Against Objectivity’, in C.Jones and P. Galison {eds), Picturing Science Producing Art (London: Routledge, 1998), 327—59. My major general sources for my discussions of photog¬ raphy were John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London: Palgrave, 1988); Peter Hamilton and Roger Hargreaves, The Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Iden tity in Nineteenth Century Photography (London: Lund Humphries, 2001); Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); in addition, I took many ideas from Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. “‘Stars should hence¬ forth register themselves’”, British fournalfor the History of Science, 30 (1997), 177—202; and Holly Rothermel, ‘Images of the Sun: Warren De la Rue, George Biddell Airy and Celestial Photography’, British fournal for the History of Science, 26 (1993), 137-69. 4

GOD

I based my discussion of the Prayer Gauge debate and the Victorian struggles for scientific authority on Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Efe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 151—200. For social sciences and statistics, I relied on Theodore Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820—igoo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). The best writer on nineteenth-century geology is Martin Rudwick: I referred to the essays collected in his The New Science of Geology: Studies in the Earth Sciences in the Age of Revolution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 5

EVOLUTION

For Robert Chambers, I relied on James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural

Special Sources

385

History of Creation (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), and the facsimile edition by University of Chicago Press, 1994, which has an excellent introduction by J. A. Secord. For caricatures and for Darwin’s attitudes towards women, 1 used two essays in Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1987)—-James Paradis, ‘Satire and Science in Victorian Culture’, 143—75, ^nd Evelyn Richards,‘Redrawing the Boundaries: Darwinian Science and Victorian Women Intellectuals’, 119—42. 6

POWER

For basic information, I turned to Iwan Rhys Morus, When Physics Became King (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005). I took my comparisons of Britain, France, America, and Germany from Terry Shinn, ‘The Industry, Research, and Education Nexus’, in Mary Jo Nye (ed.). The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 133—53; and from Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist’s Role in Society:A Comparative Study (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1971). For global modernization, I relied on C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World ij8o-igi4 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), esp. 284—324. My other main sources were James R. Bartholomew, The Formation of Science in Japan: Building a Research Tradition (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1989); Nathan Sivin, ‘Science in China’s Past’, in Leo A. Orleans (ed.). Science in Contemporary China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), 1—29; Zaheer Baber, The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilisation, and Colonial Rule in India (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); and Satpal Sangwan,‘Indian Response to European Science and Technology 1757—1857’, British Journal for the History of Science, 21 (1988), 211-32. 7

TIME

I took my account of the Parisian pneumatic clocks from Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003), 92—8; this mar¬ vellous book is also my major source for Einstein and relativity. For telegraphy and precision, I relied on Simon Schaffer,‘Metrology, Metrication, and Victorian Values’, in Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 438—74; and Simon Schaffer, ‘Accurate Measurement is an English Science’, in M. Norton Wise (ed.). The Values of Precision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 135—72.1 took Einstein as a Germanic hero from Richard Staley, ‘On the Histories of Relativity: The Propagation and Elaboration of Relativity Theory in Participant Histories in Germany, 1905-11’, Isis, 89 (1998), 263—99; ^^d my account of Eddington is closely based on John Earman and Clark Glymour, ‘Relativity and Eclipses: The British Eclipse Expeditions of 1919 and their Predecessors’, Historical Studies in Physical Science, 11 (1980), 49-85.

386

Special Sources

VI

Invisibles I LIFE

My sources for basic information were Peter Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1984); and William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function, and Transformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 1 based my comments about Mary Shelley’s science on Marilyn Butler’s introduction in Mary Shelley, Frartkenstein or The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).The relationships between natural history and biology in the nine¬ teenth century are discussed in Lynn K. Nyhart, ‘Natural History and the “New” Biology’, in N.Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (eds). Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 426—43. For the PasteurPouchet debate, I relied on Gerald L. Geison, The Private Science of Fouis Pasteur (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 110-42; and the shorter account in John Waller, Fabulous Science: Fact and Fiction in the History of Scientific Discovery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 15-46. For my account of Haeckel’s diagrams, I am indebted to Nick Hop wood. Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud: Ernst Haeckel’s Embryological Illustrations’, Isis, 97 (2006), 260—301. 2 DISEASE

The basic texts I used were Mark Harrison, Disease and the Modern World: 1300 to the Present Day (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004); and William F. Bynum, Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For my analyses of Snow and Lister, I relied mainly on John Waller, Fabulous Science: Fact and Fiction in the History of Scientific Discovery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 114-31, 160—75. For images of illness, I used Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (London: Allen Lane, 1979); and Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 245—72. 3 RAYS

As a standard history of radioactivity, I used G. 1. Brown, Invisible Rays:The History of Radioactivity (Stroud: Sutton, 2002). For discussions of spiritualism and pho¬ tography, I relied on Iwan Rhys Morus, When Physics Became King (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005) and Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). I took my account of N-rays from Mary Jo Nye, Science in the Provinces: Scientfic Communities and Provincial Feadership in France, 1860-igjo (Berkeley/London: University of California Press, 1986), 53—77.

special Sources

387

4 PARTICLES

My biographical information about Mendeleev came mainly from B. M. Kedrov’s article in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. For cloud chambers, I relied on Peter Galison and Alexi Assnius, ‘Artificial Clouds, Real Particles’, in David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (eds). The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 225—74; Peter Galison, How Experiments End (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1987). For quarks, I turned to Michael Riordan, The Hunting of the Quark: A True Story of Modern Physics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); and for mass, to Gordon Kane,‘The Mysteries of Mass’, Scientific American (July 2005). 5 GENES For basic information, I turned to Garland Allen, Eife Science in theTwentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 1978); and also to two of Peter Bowler’s books. Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), and The Eontana History of the Environmental Sciences (London: Fontana Press, 1992).The strong links between American and German eugenics are exposed in Stefan Kiihl, The Nazi Question: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Mendel’s predeces¬ sors and life are closely examined in Robert Olby, Origins of Mendelism (London: Constable, 1966). 6 CHEMICALS

I took background material on medicine from Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: HarperCollins, 1997). To discuss the various anaemias, I used Keith Wailoo, Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore/London: Johns Flopkins University Press, 1997), and Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). For my discus¬ sion of Alexander Fleming, I relied on Robert Bud, ‘Penicillin and the New Elizabethans’, British fournal for the History of Science, 31 (1998), 305—33; and on John Waller, Fabulous Science: Fact and Fiction in the History of Scientific Discovery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 246—67 (and for insulin, 222—45). My accounts of sexual hormones and the pill are based on Nelly Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex Hormones (London/New York; Routledge, 1994); and Suzanne White Junod and Lara Marks,‘Women’s Trials: The Approval of the First Contraceptive PiW,fournal of the History of Medicine, 57 (2002), 117—60; I based my comments on Viagra on Malcolm Potts,‘Two Pills, Two Paths: A Tale of Gender Bias’, Endeavour, 27 (2003), 127—30.

388

Special Sources

7

UNCERTAINTIES

I took my opening discussion of Einstein and Freud mainly from Ronald Clark, Einstein:The Life and Times (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973), 297—355. My main sources for discussing Freud’s photograph was J. C. Spector, The Aesthetics of Freud: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Art (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1972); and for his life, 1 turned to Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Time (London: Dent, 1988), and also James Strachey’s brief but excellent introduction in Sigmund Freud, Two Short Accounts of Psycho-analysis (London: Penguin, 1991). For military psychiatry,

1 relied on Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830—igSo (London: Virago, 1987), 167—219; and Flans Pols, ‘Waking up to Shell Shock: Psychiatry in the US Military during World War IF, Endeavour, 30 (2006), 144-9.

VII I

Decisions WARFARE

I took my basic account of British science and war from the classic text, Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, Science and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). For Big Science and the Manhattan Project, 1 relied heavily on Jeff Hughes, The Manhattan Project: Big Science and the Atom Bomb (Duxford: Icon, 2002); and Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (London: Penguin, 1986). For a powerful reappraisal of science-technology relationships, I read David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since igoo (London: Profile Books, 2007). 2

HEREDITY

For examples of helix iconography, I used Soraya de Chadarevian and Harmke Kamminga, Representations of the Double Helix (Cambridge: Whipple Museum, 2002). I took the story of the photograph from Soraya de Chadarevian,‘Portrait of a Discovery: Watson, Crick, and the Double Helix’, Isis, 94 (2003), 90—105.1 based my account of DNA not only on James D. Watson, The Double Helix (London: Penguin, 1997), with an introduction by Steve Jones, but also on Garland Allen, Fife Science in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979); and Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (London: HarperCollins, 2002). My main sources for the political implications of genes were R. C. Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of an Idea (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991); and Jean-Paul Gaudilliere,

Special Sources

389

‘Globalization and Regulation in the Biotech World: The Transatlantic Debates over Cancer Genes and Genetically Modified Crops’, Osiris, 21 (2006), 251—72. 3 COSMOLOGY

My main sources for Wegener and the relationships between geology and the Earth sciences were Robert Muir Wood, The Dark Side of the Earth (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985); David Oldroyd, Thinking about the Earth: A History of Ideas in Geology (London: Athlone, 1996), chs. ii to 13; and Peter Bowler, The Environmental Sciences (London: Fontana, 1992), ch. 9. 1 also benefited from a lecture by Jon Agar, which helped me think anew about the 1960s. I took my account of Leavitt from George Johnson, Miss Leavitt’s Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe (New York: Norton, 2005). For the changing fortunes of General Relativity, 1 relied on Jean Eisenstaedt, The Curious History of Relativity: How Einstein’s Theory of Gravity Was Lost and Eound Again (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). For ways of thinking about science, 1 was inspired by Peter Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World ^Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 4 INFORMATION

For Alan Turing himself, I referred to the major biography, Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (London: Burnett Books, 1983); for his significance, 1 relied heavily on Jon Agar, Turing and the Universal Machine: The Making of the Modern Computer (Duxford: Icon, 2001). My emphasis on secrecy and the Cold War was inspired by Michael Aaron Dennis, ‘Secrecy and Science Revisited: From Politics to Historical Practice and Back’, in Ronald E. Doel and Thomas Soderqvist (eds). The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology and Medicine: Writing Recent Science (London/New York: Routledge, 2006), 172—84; and by Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).The original article accompanying Figure 55, ‘The Thinking Machine’, is in Time (23 Jan. 1950) (available on the Internet). 5 RIVALRY

My mam source for the space race was Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985). For the political implications of nuclear power, I relied heavily on the essays by John Krige and Kai-Henrik Barth (eds). Global Power Knowledge: Science and Technology in International Affairs {Osiris, vol. 21); in particular, I took the Star Wars connection from Sheila Jasanoff,‘Biotechnology and Empire: The Global Power of Seeds and Science’, 273—92. I took several comments about the military/scientific produc¬ tion of knowledge from Michael Aaron Dennis, ‘Earthly Matters: On the Cold War and the Earth Sciences’, Social Studies of Science, 33 (2003), 809—19.

390

Special Sources

6

ENVIRONMENT

I based my discussion of landscape and wilderness on William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, in William Cronon (ed.). Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York/Tondon: Norton, 1995), 23—90; Mark Dowie, ‘Conservation Refugees’, Orion (Nov/Dec 2005); and Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (Tondon: HarperCollins, 1995). For ecology and environment, 1 relied on Peter J. Bowler, The Fontana History of the Environmental Sciences (London: Fontana Press, 1992, esp. 503-53; and Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1977). For Rachel Carson’s impact, 1 used the ‘Afterword’ by Linda Lear in Silent Spring (London: Penguin, 1999). 1 took my comments on meteorological computer models from MottT Greene,‘Looking for a General for Some Modern Major Models’, Endeavour, 30 (2006), 55—9. 7

FUTURES

My comments on the politicization of development programmes relied on Alexis de Crieff and Mauricio Nieto 01arte,‘WhatWe Still Do Not Know about SouthNorth Technoscientific Exchange: North-Centrism, Scientific Diffusion, and the Social Studies of Science’, in Ronald E. Doel and Thomas Soderqvist (eds). The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology and Medicine: Writing Recent Science (London/New York: Routledge, 2006), 239—59; and on Sheila Jasanoff, ‘Biotechnology and Empire: The Global Power of Seeds and Science’, in John Krige and Kai-Henrik Barth (eds). Global Power Knowledge: Science and Technology in International Affairs {Osiris, vol. 21), 273—92. My use-based approach towards technological innovation was taken from David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since igoo (London: Profile Books, 2007).

Index

Page numbers in bold refer to illustrations.

agriculture:

altruism, and evolution 322

and Green Revolution 359—60

anaemia 296

and innovations in 69

anatomy:

Agrippa, Henry 102, 103, 104

and Galen 29—30

AIDS 268

and Harvey 121—3, 124

Albert the Great 78, 79

and religion 121

al-Blrum, Abu Raihan 62,65,67

andVesalius 118-19,120, 121

alchemy:

see also medicine

and alchemist’s chamber 85, 86

Anglican Church 223

and Bacon (Roger) 87—8

animal magnetism, see mesmerism

and characteristics of 85—6

Anning, Mary 205

and chemistry 50, 180

Anouilh,Jean 255

differentiation from 180—i

Antarctica 341

and experiments 87

Apollinaire, GuiUaume 238

and history of 84—5

Aquinas,Thomas 78—9

and influence on science 86—7 and Newton 5, 84, 140, 141

and synthesis of Aristotelianism and Christianity 79, 81

and number seven 3

Archimedes 16, 17, 36, 37, 38, 39

and the philosophers’ stone 85

Arendt, Hannah 177

and secrecy of 88—9

Aristarchus 18

and transmuting lead into gold 86

Aristotle 16, 17, 31

Aldrm, Edwin ‘Buzz’

343

Alexander the Great 17, 23 Alhazen (AbO ‘Ah al-Hasan ibn al-Haitham) 65,66,75

and alchemy 84 and Aquinas’s synthesis with Christianity 79, 81 and chain of being 29

alpha rays 271

and Christian objections to 78

Alpher, Ralph 271

and cosmology of 21—3, 79

Al-RazT, Muhammad ibn Zakariyya, see Rhazes

and elemental view of matter 32—3

Index

392

Aristotle {Continued) and influence of 21—2, 77 and life sciences 28—9 and mediaeval Europe 73

atomic bomb 309 and Manhattan project 312—15 atomic structure 275—6, 279—83, 312 and Periodic Table 277—9

and motion 79—80

atomism, and ancient Greece 34—5

and teleological approach of 33—4

Aubrey, John 124

and translations of 77

Audubon, James 348—9

armillary sphere 24, 25

Austen, Jane 191

Armstrong, Neil 343

Averroes (Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn

Arnold, Matthew 284 art, and derivation of term 74

Rushd) 59, 77, 78 Avicenna (Abu All al-Husain ibn Sina) 57

artificial intelligence 336

and alchemy 85

astrolabes 64—5

and The Book of Healing 56—7

astrology:

and Canon of Medicine 57

and astronomy 3—4, 50, 81 and Babylon 12, 13

B^^,Vitamin 295,296

and Black Death 82—3

Babbage, Charles 185, 186, 189

and mediaeval Europe 81—3

Babylon:

and medicine 81—2

and astrology 12, 13

and Ptolemy 26

and astronomy 12—13, I5

astronomy: and ancient Greece 20—6

and bureaucracy 9 and clay tablets 8

Aristotle’s cosmology 21—3,79

construction of ii

Ptolemy’s cosmology 23—6

interpretation of 9, 12

and astrology 3—4, 50, 81

and cuneiform writing 8

and Babylon 12—13, I5

and fables surrounding 8—9

and Big Bang 329—30

and influence of 7, 12

and black holes 330

and mathematics 13

and China 52—3

teaching of 9—ii

and expanding Universe 328—30

and numbering system ii

and geology 328

and origins of science 6—7

and high-energy astrophysics 330—1

and time-keeping 13—15

and Islamic world 58, 62—6

and zodiac system 13

observatories 58, 63, 64 and mechanical cosmology:

Bacon, Francis: and experimental research 131—3

Boyle 130

and Novum Organum 131, 132

Descartes 126—30

and Royal Society 149, 153

mechanical imagery 126 theological support for 130 and photography 219

Bacon, Roger 74—5, 76, 78 and alchemy 87—8 Baghdad:

and religion 224

as Islamic educational centre 58

m the Renaissance:

and translation of international texts 58, 61

Copernicus 108—ii

Banks,Joseph 151-3,157,218

court-based iii

Bateson,William 286

Galileo 115-17

batteries 182

Kepler 113-15

Beckett, Samuel 20

Regiomontanus (Johannes Muller) 96

Becquerel, Henri 271

Tycho Brahe iii—13

BeU,Jocelyn 330

and steady state theory 329, 330

Bernard of Chartres 72

Index

BerthoUet, Claude i88

Brougham, Henry 199,201,202,206

beta rays 271

Brouncker, William 149

Bethe, Hans 271

Brown, Capability 348

Big Bang theory 329—30

Browne, Sir Thomas loi

Big Science 307

Buffon, Georges 158—9, 226

and drivers of 310

Buridan,Jean 80

and Earth science 326

Byron, George 138

and government 310—11,312

Byzantium 44

393

and human genome project 322, 323 and industry 311

cabbalism, and Renaissance magic 103

and Manhattan project 312—15

Calder, Ritchie 147

and mass media 310, 3ii

calendars:

and warfare 309, 312

and Babylon 13—15

biological weapons 316

and Christianity 14

biology:

and Eurocentrism 7

and cell theory 258

see also time-keeping

and embryology 258—60

Camper, Pieter 158, 160, 218, 221

and invention of word 193

canals 171

and nature of life 255—6

cancer 267—8

and spontaneous generation 256—8

Carroll, Lewis 5

see also anatomy; botany; evolution; genetics;

Carson, Rachel 352

life sciences; medicine; molecular biology

cartography:

biotechnology 323,359

and Eurocentrism xiii

Bismarck, Otto von 258

and time-keeping 247

Black,Joseph 182

cathedrals, and mediaeval Europe 70—1

Black Death, and astrology 82—3

cathode ray tube 270, 272

black holes 330

cathode rays 269-70, 270-1, 272

Bletchley Park 332, 335—6

Catholic Church, and German campaign

blood circulation, and Harvey 122 Bohr, Niels 279,303,305 and quantum mechanics 304—5

against 258 Cavendish laboratory 240, 243, 272, 275, 279 ceU theory 258

Bonaparte, Napoleon 185

Chadwick,James 279—80

Borges, Jorge Luis 362, 363

chain of being, and Aristotle 29, 159, 160, 231

Born, Max 304, 305

Chambers, Ephraim 154—5

Boswell, James 174 botany, and classification 155

Cydopcedia 154—5 Chambers, Robert 233—4

Linnaeus 156—7, 158

Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor 44, 46, 68

Ray 155-6

Charles I, King of England 123

Bougainville, Louis de 347

Charles II, King of England 123, 149

Boulton, Matthew 170, 174

Chartres, and monastic school at 72

Boyle, Robert 123,135

Chartres Cathedral 70

and mechanical cosmology 130 Brahe, Tycho 111-13 Brecht, Bertolt 36,108,117 British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) 191,203,212 and intellectual class system 204

Chaucer, Geoffrey 61,64 chemistry: and alchemy 50, 180 differentiation from 180—i and the Chemical Revolution 177 chemical laboratory 180,181

British Empire, and global telegraph system 213

Davy 182

British Museum 163

elusiveness of 182—3

Index

394

chemistry: {Continued)

cloning 316

Lavoisier 177-8, 179-80

cloud chamber 280, 281

practical nature of chemistry 180—2

Coalbrookdale 171—2

significance of 183

coffee houses 148, 157

and Periodic Table 277—9, 282

Cold War 277

Chesterton, G K 299

and computer science 332, 336

China 41

and International Geophysical Year

and astronomy 52—3, 244 and comparison with Europe 50 centralized administration 51

(1957-8)

340-1

and science and politics 339—40, 341—2, 345 and space flight 340, 341,342-3

education system 50—1

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 191,217

religious and philosophical attitudes 51

Collins,Wilkie 215

social barriers to knowledge transmission 50

Columbus, Christopher 50, 93, 96, 207

and development of science in 53—4

comets, and Newton 139, 140

and Eurocentric view of history of science 45

communication 356

and European ignorance about 48

and globalization of 212—13

and Needham’s scholarship on 48—9

and the Renaissance 93, 95

and scientific achievement 49 and scientific innovation 49 limited impact of 49—50 and Shen Gua 51—3

computer science: and Bletchley Park 332, 335—6 and Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC) 333-4, 335

chlorosis 295—6

and human-machine boundaries 336—7

cholera 263—4

and role of military 332, 333, 337

Christianity:

and secrecy surrounding origins 332

and age of the Earth 226—9

and state-funding 332—3

and Aristotelian cosmos 22

and Turing 335—8

and calendars 14, 15

and utopianism 337—8

and Christocentricism 43, 173

conception 291

and geology 225—6

Constantine, Emperor 44

and mediaeval Europe:

Constantinople 44

accommodation to capitalism 71—2

consumerism 175

cathedrals 70—1

continental drift 324—5,326,327

changed view of God 72

contraceptive piUs 296, 297

monastic scholarship 69—70

Cook, James 151

time-keeping 70—1

Copernicus, Nicolas 5, 45, 96, 108,109,

and nature of life 256 see also religion chromosomes 287—8

iio-ii, 118 and Neoplatonism 103, no craftsmen:

Churchill,Winston 310—ii

and clock-making 126

classification:

and low status in ancient Greece 37, 38

and animal kingdom 232—3

in mediaeval Europe 70, 80

and botany 155—7

and recognition of 118

and dilemmas of 362—3

and Renaissance magic 104

and discrimination 156—7, 160

and scientific instruments 133, 164

and need for 154 clocks:

Crick, Francis 316—21 Crookes, William 269—70, 277

and 17th-century clockwork imagery 125—6

cuneiform writing 8

and mediaeval Europe 71,80—1

Curie, Marie 272, 274, 275, 304

see also time-keeping

Curie, Pierre 274, 275

Index

curiosities, and international trade in 97

Doomsday Clock 344

Cuvier, Georges 227, 232—3

drug trials 296

cyclotrons 311

395

and contraceptive pill 297 drugs 292

da Vinci, Leonardo 18

Diirer, Albrecht 95, 97, 98—9, 100

Dante Alighieri 48 Dark Ages 44, 45 Darwin, Charles 88,204,284,359 and caricature of 231, 236 and evolution 230, 234—7

Earth: and age of 226—9 and heat death 239 Earth science 325—6

and opposition to 285—6

and asteroid impacts 327—8

and women 236, 291

and astronomy 328

Darwin, Emma 232

and Big Science 326

Darwin, Erasmus 174, 175

and continental drift 324—5, 327

and evolution 231—2 Darwin, Francis 16 Darwin, Leonard 285 Darwinian Revolution 183 data collection, and search for physical laws 208,212

and plate tectonics 327 see also geology ecology 350 and machine imagery 351 Eddington,Arthur 88,250—1 Edison, Thomas 74

Davy, Humphrey 167, 168-9, 182, 194

Egypt 6

Dawkins, Richard 322—3

Einstein, Albert 183,248-9,299-300, 309, 312, 328

decimalization, and French Revolution 186—7

and expanding Universe 329, 330

Dee,John loi, 105-6

and quantum mechanics 303, 304—5, 330, 331

Deep Blue computer 337

and theory of relativity 249—51

deism 185 Democritus 16, 17 and atomism 34

electricity 193 and Enlightenment entrepreneurship 164—6 and field theory 239, 242

Desaguliers,John 141—2, 143, 151

and lightning rods 165—6

Descartes, Rene 124, 125—30, 141

and shock therapy 166

and magnetism 128—9

electromagnetism:

and mechanical cosmology 126—9

and birth of discipline 193—4

and mechanical imagery 125

and field theory 240—1, 242

and mind-body duality 129—30 and optics 137 and Prindpia Philosophice 126—7

Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC) 333-4,335 electrons 269-70, 270-1,272, 273, 279, 280, 281

design, argument from 34, 130

elements, and Aristotle 32—3

determinism 225, 303

Eliot,T S 93,332

deterrence, and nuclear weapons 345

embryology 258—60

development 357—8 and Green Revolution 359—60 diabetes 293—4

and stages of evolution 259 Encydopcedia Britannica 154 encyclopaedias:

diagrams, and use of 208—9

and Enlightenment 154—5

Dickens, Charles 185,262

and Islamic world 56—7, 59

Dioscorides 67, 99

and mediaeval Europe 69—70

Dirac, Paul 131

and Renaissance natural history 99—100

Disraeli, Benjamin 199

Encydopedie 154, 155

DNA, and structure of 316—17, 318—19, 320

energy:

Dobzhansky,Theodosius 289

and Anglo-German approaches to 241

396

Index

energy: {Continued)

Euclid 16

and Second Law ofThermodynamics 239

eugenics 284—5,290,298

and thermodynamics 238

Eurocentrism:

Engels, Friedrich 175—6

and calendars 7

English Civil War 123

and caricatures of other cultures 46

Enlightenment:

and cartography xiii

and access to science 163, 167

and history of science 43—7

and classification 154—61

and myth of European superiority 45

botany 155-7, 158

and origins of 44—5

discrimination 156—7, 160

and relegation of 47

encyclopaedias 154—5

and role of Islamic world 45

and growth of public institutions 148

Evelyn,John 97

and imperial development 157

evolution:

and industrialization 170—3,174—6 criticism of 175—6

and altruism 322 and anti-Darwimamsm 285—6, 288

and Newton’s influence 144

and argument from design 34

and reservations about science 169

and Chambers (Robert) 233—4

and scientific careers 162—3

and Cuvier 232—3

and scientific entrepreneurship 162, 163, 164

and Darwin (Charles) 230, 234—7

electricity 164—6

and Darwin (Erasmus) 231—2

and scientific societies 147—52, 173—4

and Darwinian synthesis 288—9, 290

and status of science/engineering 170, 174

and embryology 258—60

and women and science 166—7

and ferocious debates over 230—1

entertainment, and Enlightenment science 164—5,166,168 entrepreneurship, and Enlightenment science 162, 163, 164 electricity 164—6 industrialization 170—3, 174—6 environment:

and Lamarck 232 and molecular genetics 321 and opposition to 321 and political and religious attitudes 231, 233, 236-7 in pre-Darwin period 230 and progress 259

and campaigns to protect 352

and religion 224

and Carson’s Silent Spring 352

and selfish gene 322—3

and costs of protecting 349—50

and social Darwinism 237

and global warming 353—4

and teleology 34

and Green Revolution 359

experiments & experimentation:

and machine imagery 351

and alchemy 84, 86, 87

and man-made landscape 347, 348

and anatomy:

and Nazi policy 348

Galen 29—30

and paradox of conservation 350

Harvey 122, 124

and physicists’ concern over 350—1

and conflicting results 257

and protection of 347

and Descartes 125, 126

and recent appeal of wilderness 349

and Enlightenment science:

and scare stories 353 Epicurus 31 and atomism 34—5 epicycles, and Ptolemy’s theory of 25—6

Davy 169 electricity 165 scientific societies 146, 149, 150, 151, 168 and Hooke 133—4

epidemics 262

and human subjects 292—3

equality 356

and impossibility of detached

ethics, and gene therapy 323

observation 303—4

Index

and mediaeval Europe, Roger Bacon 75, 87—8

Galen 29—30

and Newton 5, 136-7

Galileo Galilei 5, 68, 76, 91, 108,

and the Renaissance 91

115-17

Francis Bacon 131—3

Galton, Francis 220,221,224,285

John Dee 106

Galvani, Fuigi 165

and science 20, 37

gamma rays 271

and scientific instruments 133

Gamow, George 271

and unexpected results 272—3

Gandhi, Mahatma 244, 358

exploration;

gases 225

and Humboldt 207, 208, 209-12

Gauss, Karl 220

and the Renaissance 93—4, 96—7

Gaussian distribution 220

extraterrestrial life 128, 339

397

gears 69 Geiger, Hans 275

Fabrici, Girolamo (Fabricius) 121, 122

GeU-Mann, Murray 282

falsification 301

gene therapy 323

Faraday, Michael 89, 167-8, 209, 213, 218, 239

genes 288

and electromagnetism 194

genetic engineering 359

and scientific laws 199—200

genetically modified crops 316, 359—60

feminism 291; see also women

genetics 285—90

Fermi, Enrico 313, 314, 339

and anti-Darwinian origins 285—6, 288

Ficino, Marsilio 102—3,110

and biotechnology 323

field theory 213,239,242

and human genome project 322, 323

field-work 207—8

and Mendel 237, 286

Fleming, Alexander 295

and Morgan 286—8

Fontenelle, Bernard de la 261

and selfish gene 322—3

fossils:

and sociobiology 322

and age of the Earth 224

and Soviet view of 290

and amateur collectors 193

and structure of DNA 316—21

and evolution 233, 234 and Mary Anning 205

geology: and age of the Earth 226—9

Franklin, Benjamin 71,150,165—6

and asteroid impacts 327—8

Franklin, Rosalind 317,318,321

and astronomy 328

free will 225

and biblical theology 224

French Revolution 177

and birth of discipline 193

and decimalization 186—7

and Christianity 225—6

and education system 188

and continental drift 324—5, 326, 327

and health care 187

see also Earth science

French Royal Society, and state-funding 151

George II 143

Fresnel, Augustin 189

Gerard of Cremona 77—8, 81, 84

Freud, Sigmund 278,299,300—3,305

germ theory 264—7

Fromond,Jane 106

German Romantic philosophy 197

Frost, Robert 324 Fulcher of Chartres 43 future 355—6 and dangers of prediction 355 and science 357, 361

and Naturpliilosophen 215—17 Germany: and campaign against Catholic Church 258 and state-funding of science education 242—3 Gesner, Conrad 99—100

Gagarin,Yuri 340, 342

Gilbert, William 113, 128, 133

Gaia hypothesis 352

Gillray, James 168, 182, 194, 262, 263

398

Index

global warming 353—4

Haeckel, Ernst 258—60,350

globalization of science:

Hales, Stephen 162

and British Empire 213

Halley, Edmond 139

in nineteenth-century 207, 212

Harvey,William 5, 121—3, 124, 132, 293

Goering, Hermann 348

Hauksbee, Francis 165

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von:

Hawking, Stephen 331

and optics 216

health, and changed attitudes towards 296

and subjectivity 216—17

heat death 239

government:

Heath, William (Paul Fry) 202

and Big Science 310—11,312

Heisenberg,Werner 303,304,305

and genetic research 322

Helmholtz, Hermann 241—2

see also state-funding

Hermes Trismegistus 84, 102

Gravesande, Willem Jacob‘s 141

Hero of Alexandria 18, 38

gravity, and Newton 138, 139, 140, 141

Herschel,John 219,245,246

Gray, Stephen 165,166

Hertz, Heinrich 242

Great Britain:

Higgs boson 283

and free enterprise approach to science 242 and technical education 243 Greece (ancient): and astronomy 20—6

Hippocrates 16, 27—8 and Hippocratic oath 27 Hiroshima 315 history, and nature of xiii, 16 Hitler, Adolf 284,348

Aristotle’s cosmology 21—3,79

Hodgkin, Dorothy 294—5,

Ptolemy’s cosmology 23—6

Hohenheim,Theophrastus von, 5ec

and contribution of lower social orders 37—9 and cultural context of scientific thought 18—19

3^1

Paracelsus Holbein, Hans 93, 94, 95, 100 Holy Roman Empire 68

and gaps in historical record 17—18

Homer 46

and geometric thought 13

Hooke, Robert 123

and Graecocentrism 43

and Micrographia 134—5

and historical periodization 17

and scientific instruments 133—4, I35

and intellectual heroes 16—18 ensuring posthumous reputation 39 and intellectual influence of 19

hormones 292, 294 horse harnesses 69 hospitals:

and mathematics 20

and French rationalization 187

and matter:

in Islamic world 58—9

Aristotle’s elements 32—3

in nineteenth-century 261

conflicting views on 31—2

Hoyle, Fred 329, 330, 339

Epicurus’s atomism 34—5

Hubble, Edwin 328, 329

and medicine 27—8 Galen 29—30 Hippocratics 27-8

human genome project 322, 323 Humboldt, Alexander von 207, 208, 209—12, 213, 227

and social context of science 37

and Atlas of America 210, 211

and technology 36—9

as visual innovator 208—9

Green Revolution 359—60

Hume, David 143

Grove, William 191

humours, and Greek medicine 28, 29

Groves, Leslie 309, 310, 312-13, 314, 315

Hutton, James 226

gunpowder:

Huxley, Thomas 204,224,229

and Chinese invention of 49

hydrogen bombs 344

and claims ofWestern superiority 45

Hypatia of Alexandria 39

Index

Ibn al-Haitham, Abu ‘All al-Hasan, see Alhazen Ibn Rushd,Abu al-Walld Muhammad, w Averroes Ibn STna,Abu All al-Husain,

Avicenna

observatories 58,63,64 and attitudes towards learning 56—7, 60, 67 approaches to science 61—2

Ibsen, Henrik 268

religious influence 57—8

ideal forms 217—18

and decline of science 59—60

illustrations:

and educational centres 58

and Hooke’s Micrographia 134—5

astronomical observatories 58

and ideal types 217—18

caliphs’ court at Baghdad 58

and objectivity 218

teaching hospitals 58—9

in the Renaissance: anatomy 119 natural history 95, 98—9

and Eurocentric view of history of science 45, 56 and Islamic art 62

and use of diagrams 208—9

and Islamocentrism 43

see also photography

and mathematics 62—4

Imperato, Ferrante 97, 98 imperialism 46 and disease control 267

399

and medicine 66—7 Al-RazT (Rhazes) 59 Ibn Slna (Avicenna) n57

and Enlightenment 157

and optics 66

and global telegraph system 213

and translation of international texts 58, 61

and international development 357

and Western portrayal of 55—6

and Royal Society 151,152

Istanbul 44

and scientific progress 244 impetus, and Buridan’s concept of 80

Japan 243-4

India:

Jenner, Edward 262—3

as European medical laboratory 267

Johnson, Samuel 36, 37

and European science 244

Joyce,James 282

industrialization 170—3, 174—6 and criticism of 175—6 industry: and Big Science 311 and physics 238 inequality 356 infectious diseases 262—4, 266—7 and laboratory science 292

Kafka, Franz 267 Keir, James 174, 181 Kelvin, Lord (William Thomson) 204,214,

239,355 and field theory 240 Kepler,Johannes 5,75,108,113-15 and model of planetary system 114

inoculation 261,262

Key, Thomas Hewitt 291

institutions:

Keynes, John Maynard loi

and 18th-century public institutions 148

Khayyam, Omar 56, 57

and importance of 145

Khunrath, Conrad 85

see also scientific societies

Khunrath, Heinrich 86

insulin 294, 295

Knight, Gowin 163

intellectual class system 162, 163—4, 167, 168,

Koch, Robert 265,267

204-5 Intelligent Design 130, 321 International Geophysical Year (1957-8) 340—1

Kuhn, Thomas 184 and paradigm shifts 327 Kuralt, Charles 207

Internet 338 Islamic world 41 and absorption and adaptation of Greek knowledge 45—6, 58, 61 and astronomy 58, 62—6

Lamarck, Jean 232 language, and evolution of 36 Laplace, Pierre-Simon 185—6, 188—9, 224 and Newtonianism 188—90

400

Index

Lavoisier, Antoine 177—8, 179—80, 181

magic:

Lawrence, D H 31

and alchemy 90, 91

Lawrence, Ernest 311—12

in the Renaissance loi—2

Lawrence, T E 3

cabbalism 103

Lawrence, William 256

Dee 105-6

laws:

goal of 103—4

and nineteenth-century search for 197,

Greek and Islamic influences 102—3

199-201,204

influence of 106, 107

terrestrial physics 208

mathematics 105—6

and social science 224—5

natural magic 103

Leavitt, Henrietta 328—9

Paracelsus 104—5

Leibniz, Gottfried 140, 141

practical aspects 104

Leyden jar 165

theoretical aspects 104

liberal arts, and mediaeval universities 74

and Newton as magus 90, 91, loi

libraries, in Islamic world 58

and science 4—5

Liebig, Justus von 242 life:

magnetic compass: and Chinese invention of 49—50

and nature of 255—6 and spontaneous generation 122—3, 256—8 life sciences: and ancient Greece 28—9

and claims ofWestern superiority 45 magnetism 193 and Descartes 128—9 and mesmerism 194—5

and circulation of the blood 122

Malthus, Thomas 235

and reproduction 122—3

Malus, Etienne 189

see also anatomy; biology; genetics; medicine;

Manhattan project 312—15

molecular biology

Maragha, and astronomical observatory at 58

light, speed of 249

Marcet,Jane 167

lightning rods 165—6

Marconi, Gugliemo 242

Limbourg brothers 14

Martin, Benjamin 164, 167

linear accelerators 276

MarveU,Andrew 355

Linnaeus, Carl:

Marx, Karl 34, 147, 176, 225

and agricultural ambitions 157—8

mass, and subatomic particles 283

and botanical classification 156—7, 158

mass media:

and religion 157, 159—60 Lister,Joseph 264—5

and Big Science 310,311 and nineteenth-century publishing:

Locke,John 29, 55, 269

promotion of science 204

longitude, and universal numbering system 247

revolution in 203

Louis XIV, King of France 151

women’s participation m science 205—6

Lovelock,James 352

and science 351—2

Lunar Society 173—4, I75

materialism, and nature of life 255, 256

Luther, Martin 121

mathematics:

Lyell, Charles 205,209,227,325 and Principles of Geology 227, 228

and alchemy 87 and ancient Greece 4, 20, 21, 37—8

Lyell, Mary 205,227

and astrology 81

Lysenko,Trofim 289,290

and astronomy 103, no, in and Babylon 7, 8, 9—11, 13

McArthur, Stuart, and the Universal Corrective Map of the World xiii, xiv McEwan, Ian 230 McLuhan, Marshall 337

and evolution 288 and French approach to science 185, 186, 188,190 and genetics 286

Index

and Islamic world 62—4, 65, 66

and astrology 81—2

and magic 90, loi, 104, 105, 106

and chemical approaches to 292—8

and mediaeval Europe 80, 83

and diagnosis 262, 292

and Newton 56, 138, 139, 140-1

in eighteenth century 261

and Renaissance magic 105—6

and establishment of scientific

and search for mathematical laws 200, 204, 208, 279, 305 matter, and ancient Greece:

boundaries 196 and French rationalization 187 and gene therapy 323

Aristotle’s elements 32—3

and germ theory 264—7

conflicting views on 31—2

and hospitals 261

Epicurus’s atomism 34—5

and infectious diseases 262—4, 266—7

see also atomic structure

and Islamic world 66—j

Maxwell,James Clerk 225,246 and the aether 240—1 model of 240 measurement:

Al-RazT (Rhazes) 59 Ibn Slna (Avicenna) 57 and laboratory science 292—3 and mesmerism 194—5, ipb

and French metric system 186—7, 189

and military imagery 265—6

and precision 245—6

in nineteenth-century 261—2

and science 214

and Paracelsus 104—5

and universal standards 246, 247

and patient expectations 296

mechanics 37—8 and mechanical cosmology:

and psychiatry 302 and Ptolemaic astrology 26

Boyle 130

and scientific instruments 293

Descartes 126—30

and shock therapy 166

Newton’s laws of motion 139

and statistical approaches 293

theological support for 130

and vaccination 262—3

mediaeval Europe 41, 45

and women:

and Black Death 82—3

chlorosis 295—6

and capitalist credit system 71—2

contraception 296—7

and cathedrals 70—1

hormones 296—7

and changed view of God 72

see also anatomy

and changed view of nature 72

Meitner, Eee 312

and conventional view of 68

Mendel, Gregor 237, 286

and economic revival 68

Mendeleev, Dmitrii 278—9

and foundations of future science 69

Mendelism 285—6

and monastic scholarship 69—70, 72

Mesmer, Franz 194—5, 19b

and status of theoretical/practical

mesmerism 194—5, 196

subjects 74 and technical innovation 68, 69, 70 and theology’s influence on scholarship 73,

74, 75-6

Mesopotamia, see Babylon metric system 189 and French Revolution 186—7 miasmas 262

and time-keeping 70—1,80—1

microscopes 256, 258

and translations of Greek texts 77—8

Middle Ages, see mediaeval Europe

and universities 72—4

military:

curriculum 73—4 medicine: and ancient Greece 27—8 Galen 29—30 Hippocratics 27—8

and Cold War science 341—2 and computer science 332,333,337 Millikan, Robert 88,273—4 mind-body duality, and Descartes 129—30

401

Index

402

molecular biology:

and laws of motion 139

and evolution 321

as magus 90, 91, loi

and structure of DNA 316—17,318—19,320, 321

and mathematics 139, 140—i

see also biology

and misleading picture of 139

monasteries, and mediaeval Europe 69—70, 72

and optics 5,136—7, 189,217

Montagu, Mary Wortley 261,262

and Principia 139—40

Morgan,Thomas Hunt 286—8

and promotion of his ideas 141—3

Morse, Samuel 212

and reliance on earlier work 139

motion:

and role of God 140

and Aristotle 79—80

and Royal Society 147

and Newton’s laws 139

and statue of 199, 200

Muir, John 348, 349

andVictorian worship of 215

Muller, Johannes (Regiomontanus) 95—6, 100

Nietzche, Friedrich 215

muses, and mediaeval scholarship 73, 74

Nightingale, Florence 220, 263

music, and Pythagoras 21

normal distribution 220 normality:

Nabonassar, King of Babylon 6

and numerical concept of 220—1

Nagasaki 315

and photography 220

natural history: and classification 155

North-South relations 357—8 N-rays 273—4

Linnaeus 156—7, 158

nuclear fission 312

Ray 155-6

nuclear fusion 344

m the Renaissance 97—100 natural selection:

nuclear power 345 nuclear research 312

and Darwin’s theory of 234—5

and Manhattan project 312—15

and progress 259

and peaceful applications 345

see also evolution

and weapons development 344—5

Naturphilosophen 215—16, 258 and influence of 216 and subjectivity 216—17

nuclear weapons, and Manhattan project 312—15 numbering systems, and Babylon ii, 13

Nazism, and environmentalism 348

numerology, and number seven 3

Needham, Joseph, and China 48—9

Nuremburg 95—6

‘Needham’s problem’ 53 scientific development 53—4

objectivity 215

Needham Research Institute 49

and doubts over 215

Nehru,Jawaharlal 345

and elimination of human observers 218

Nemerov, Howard 347

and photography 218—19

Neoplatonism:

and problem of interpretation 218

and Copernicus 103, no

and realist illustrations 218

and Dee 106

and social control 219—20

and influence of 103

and statistics 220

neutrons 276, 280

and victory of 217

Newbould, Frank 348

Oersted, Hans 194

Newton, Isaac xv, 31, 56

openness, and science 88

and alchemy 5, 84, 140, 141

Oppenheimer, Robert 309, 310, 314—15

and comets 139, 140

optics:

and foundation of modern physics 138—9

and Bacon’s theory of vision 75

and gravity 138, 139, 140, 141

and Descartes 137

and influence of ideas 143—4

and Fresnel 189

Index

and Goethe 216—17

plate tectonics 327

and Ibn al-Haitham’s theory of vision 66

Plato 16

and Islamic world 66

and cosmic harmony 20

and Laplace 189

and heroic model of search for truth 17

and mediaeval Europe 75

and ideal forms 70

and Newton 5,136-7, 189, 217 and optical instruments 133 orrery 142—3 Orwell, George 125

Platonism 70 see also Neoplatonism Pliny 99 and Natural History 69

Oxford 123

polonium 274

oxygen, and Lavoisier 177, 178, 179

Pope,7Alexander 27,118,277 Popper, Karl 301

Padua 12I

portraiture, and photography 219—20

Paracelsus (Theophrastus von

positrons 281

Hohenheim) 104—5

Pouchet, Felix-Archimede 257

paradigm shifts 327

Pound, Ezra 68

particle accelerators 311—12

poverty, and international

Pasteur, Louis 256—8, 293

development 357—8

Paulze, Marie 177,178, 180

Prayer Gauge Debate 223

penicillin 295, 356—7

precision:

Pepys, Samuel 135

and need for agreement 246

Periodic Table 277-9, 282

and obsession with 245

and Mendeleev 278—9

prediction, and dangers of 355

and naming of elements 277—8

preformation, and reproduction 122—3

Petri dishes 265

Priestley, Joseph 173, 174, 177, 179

Petty, William 123

printing:

phlogiston 177, 178, 179

and Chinese invention of 49, 50

photography 218—19,269

and claims ofWestern superiority 45

and astronomy 219

and growth of science 95

and categorization of people 219—20

and improvements in 209

and portraiture 219—20 and social control 219—20, 221—2 see also illustrations physics:

probability 186, 189-90, 299, 303 and quantum mechanics 303—4 professionalization of science 192—3, 223 progress:

and Anglo-German approaches to 241

and embryology 258—9

and industry 238

and evolution 232, 233, 236, 237

and nineteenth-century search for

and industrialization 171

laws 199—200 and statistics 225 see also astronomy; atomic structure;

and Lunar Society 173 m the nineteenth century: Brougham’s ‘Law’ 201

electricity; electromagnetism; mechanics;

criticism of 202—3

nuclear research;

science 201

optics; quantum mechanics; relativity

steam power 203

theory; thermodynamics physiology 241—2, 291—2 and medicine 292—3

as scientific ideal 355 protons 276, 279 Psalmanazar, George 48

Pico deUa Mirandola, Giovanni 103, no

psychiatry 302

Pius XII, Pope 185

psychoanalysis 300—3

Planck, Max 184

psychology 300—1,302

403

Index

404

Ptolemy i6, 17 and alchemy 84

health care 187 Revolutionary period 186—7

and armillary sphere 24-5

Ray, John 155—6

and cosmology of 23—6

Rayleigh, Lord 204

and epicycles 25—6

Reagan, Ronald 339

and influence in Islamic world 64, 65

recapitulation 259—60

and intellectual influence of 23

reductionism 322

and translations of 78

Regiomontanus (Johannes MiiUer) 95—6,100, no

public health reform 264, 265

Reisch, Gregor 73

public institutions, in eighteenth century 148

relativity theory 183,249—51

see also scientific societies public opinion:

religion: and anatomy 121

and establishment of concept of 148

and astronomy 224

and nineteenth-century publishing:

and evolution 224

promotion of science 204

and geology 224

revolution in 203

and nineteenth-century science 224

publishing, in nineteenth century: promotion of science 204

and prayer 223 and science:

revolution in 203

authority 223

women’s participation in science 205—6

establishing distinction between 224, 227

pulsars 330 Pythagoras 16, 17 and cosmic harmony 4 and music 21 and quantitative approach to Universe 20—1

Galileo 116-17 and significance of number seven 3 see also Christianity Renaissance: and anatomy: Harvey 121-3, 124

quadrivium, and mediaeval universities 74 quantum mechanics 253, 299, 330, 331

Vesalius 118-19,120, 121 and astronomy:

and Bohr-Einstein disagreement 304—5

Copernicus 108—ii

and uncertainty 303—4

court-based in

quarks 282

Galileo 115-17

quasars 330

Kepler 113-15

Quetelet, Alphonse 224—5

Tycho Brahe 111-13 and communication 93, 95

racial prejudice:

and Eurocentrism 44—5

and classification schemes 160

and exploration 93—4, 96—7

and germ theory 266

and magic 101—2

and race-specific medical conditions 292 radicalism:

cabbalism 103 Dee 105-6

and evolution 231

goal of 103—4

and mesmerism 196

Greek and Islamic influences 102—3

and reducing risks of 201—2

influence of 106, 107

and social science 225

mathematics 105—6

radio 242

natural magic 103

radioactivity 253,271—6

Paracelsus 104—5

radium 274

practical aspects 104

rainbows, and colours of 5, 137

theoretical aspects 104

rationality, and French drive for 185—6 education system 188

and natural history 97—100 and origins of 83

Index

reproduction 291 and Harvey 122—3 revolution:

and technology 36 scientific careers: and Enlightenment establishment of 162—3

and advantages of concept 183 and change in meaning of 177 and philosophical implications of concept 183—4 and problems with concept 183 Rhazes (Muhammad ibn Zakariyya al- Razl) 59 and alchemy 84—5 road-building 171

m nineteenth-century 204 scientific cooperation: and British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) 203 and International Geophysical Year (1957-8)

340-1

and theoretical inspiration for 204 scientific instruments: in 17th century 133, 135—6

Rontgen,Wilhelm 270—1

Hooke 133-4, 135

Royal Institution 167,168

philosophical instruments 135

Royal Society

405

149

and ancient Greece 24—5, 38

and ambitions of 150

and Babylon 12

and Banks 151—3

and Chinese observatories 52—3

and British imperial expansion 151, 152

and groups of 133

as elite organization 150

and Islamic world 64—5

and establishment of 148

and measurement 246

and financing of research 150—i

and medicine 293

and membership of 163—4

and objectivity 218

and Newton 147

and the Renaissance 93—4

and publication 150

Galileo’s telescope 115

and self-image of 149—50

Tycho Brahe iii

and spreading of knowledge 150

and uncertainty 303—4

and state-funding 151

see also names of individual instruments

Ruskin,John 191,236 Russell, Bertrand 309 Rutherford, Ernest 274—6, 279, 281 and alchemy 84 Ryle, Martin 329

scientific method, as characteristic of science 204 Scientific Revolution, and problems with concept 183 scientific societies: and establishment of 147, 148—9

Sanger, Margaret 297

and nineteenth-century working class 205

Sanskrit 3

see also Lunar Society; Royal Society

scare stories 353

scientist:

Schrodinger, Erwin 315

and invention of word 191—2, 206

science:

and resistance to term 192

and Anglo-German approaches to 241, 242

selfish gene 322—3

and changed meaning of 36—7, 191

seven, and significance of the number 3—5

and definitional difficulties xiii—xiv

sexual discrimination:

and derivation of term 74 and development of disciplinary science 193, 194, 196 and origins of 5—7

and classification schemes 160 Linnaeus 156—7 and Darwin’s theory of evolution 236—7, 291 and physiologists 292

and post-Second World War optimism 44

sexuality, and psychology 300

and professionalization of 192—3

Shakespeare,William 8, 26, 82, 105, 245, 316

and status 37, 74, 200 consolidation of 204

and The Tempest 101—2, 106—7 Sheahan, Gary 313

Index

4o6

shell shock 302

statistics:

Shelley, Mary 152, 169, 255, 256

and medicine 293

Shelley, Percy Bysshe 355

and nineteenth-century thought 220

Shen Gua 51—3

and normal distribution 220

shock therapy 166

and physics 225

sickle-cell anaemia 292, 296

and search for physical laws 208

slavery 160

and social reform 220

smallpox 262—3

and social science 224—5

Smart, Christopher 138

steady state theory, and the Universe 329, 330

Smith, Adam 143, 173

steam engine 170

Snow, CP 154

steam power:

Snow, John 264

and progress 203

social control:

and social transformation 202—3

and photography 219—20,221—2

Stephenson, George 202

and time-keeping 245

sterilization 284—5

social Darwinism 237

Stonehenge 6

social reform, and statistics 220

Su Sung 52

social science 224—5

subatomic particles 269—71, 272, 273, 276,

social transformation: and arguments over ‘scientist’ label 192 and impact of technological innovation 202—3 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) 201-2,203 sociobiology 322

280-3 subjectivity 216—17 and numerical concept of normality 221 Sweden, and sterilization 284—5 Swift, Jonathan 147, 309 syphilis 267,268,292 Szyk, Arthur 108,109

Socrates 39 Solvay Conference (1927) 304—5, 315

technical education:

Somerville, Mary 205—6

and France 188

Soviet Union:

and Germany 242—3

and genetics 289, 290

and Great Britain 243

and space flight 340, 342

and United States 243

space flight, and international rivalry 340, 341, 342-4

technology: and ancient Greece 36—9

Spain 77

and future development of 355—6

specializations, and nineteenth-century

and origins of word 37

development of 192, 194

and science 36

spectrum, and colours of 5, 137

and social transformation 202—3

spiritualism 269, 270, 272

and status 37, 74

spontaneous generation:

telegraph system:

and nature of life 256—8

and globalization of communications 212—

and reproduction 122—3

and time-keeping 247—8

Sputnik 340, 342

teleology:

Standard Model, and subatomic particles 282

and Aristotle’s approach 33-4

state-funding:

and evolution 34

and Big Science 311,312

and Islamic world 62

and computer science 332—3

telescope 115

and French Royal Society 151

Tell e r, E dward 344

and German science 242—3

Tennyson,Alfred 229,230,234

and Royal Society 151

terrestrial physics, and Flumboldt 207, 208

Index

407

Thales of Miletus 5,16,17,18

vaccination 262—3

Thatcher, Margaret 201

vacuum experiments, and Hooke and Boyle 135

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam 55—6

Venice 46—7

Theed,William 200

Verdi, Giuseppe 9

theology:

Verne,Jules 229

and medieval scholarship 73, 74, 75—6

Vesalius,Andreas 30, 118—19,120, 121

and nineteenth-century science 224

Viagra 298

see also religion

vision, see optics

thermodynamics 225, 350—1

Vogt, Karl 291

and commercial applications 238

Volta, Alessandro 182

and energy 238

Voltaire 77, 141

and Second Law ofThermodynamics 239 Third World 357—8

Wang Ho 51

Thomism 79

warfare:

Thomson, Joseph John 272,279

and Big Science 309, 312

Thomson, William, see Kelvin, Lord

and nuclear research 312

time, and expansion of geological 226—9

Watson,James 316—21,324

time-keeping 7

Watson, William 166

and 17th-century clockwork imagery 125—6

Watt,James 170, 174 weather forecasting 353

and Babylon 13-15

Wedgwood,Josiah 173, 174, 175, 181, 232

and cartography 247

Wegener,Alfred 324—5,327

and mediaeval Europe 70—1

Weizmann, Chaim 311

clocks 80-1

Wells, H G 238

and national standards 246—7

Wesley, John 150

and social control 245

wheelbarrow 70

and telegraphy 247—8

Whewell, William 191,192,203,206

and universal standards 247—8

Wilkins,John 362—3

trade:

Wilkins, Maurice 317

and growth of international networks 46

Williams, William 172

and Renaissance exploration 96—7

Willis, Thomas 123—4

trivium, and mediaeval universities 74

Wilmer, Clive 223

tuberculosis 265,267

Wilson, Charles 280

Turing, Alan 335—8

Wilson, E O 322 Withering, William 174

uncertainty 253,299

women:

and quantum mechanics 303—4

and Aristotelian view of 123

and Uncertainty Principle 303

and discrimination 156—7, 160, 236—7, 291, 292

United States 349—50

and Enlightenment science 166—7

and environmentalism 349—50

and intellectual class system 166—7, 204, 205

and Manhattan project 312—15

and medicine:

and space flight 342—3

chlorosis 295—6

and state-funding of science 312

contraception 296—7

universities:

hormones 296—7

and commercial activities 323

and nineteenth-century science 205—6

and mediaeval Europe 72—4

and reproduction 123

Unmoved Mover, and Aristotle 22, 23

in science 274

uranium 271,312

as scientific drudges 328—9

Urban II, Pope 55

see also feminism

408

Index

working class 171, 201

Wright, Joseph 135, 142

and intellectual class system 166—7, 204 and scientific societies 205 World War I 309, 310-11

X-ray crystallography 292, 321 X-rays 270-1,272,273

World War II 309 and computer science 332, 335-6

yellow fever 293 Yosemite 349, 350

and Manhattan project 312—15 and state-funding of science 312 Wren, Christopher 123

Zodiac Man 81, 82 zodiac system, and Babylon 13

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Patricia Fara has a degree in physics from Oxford University and a PhD in History of Science from London University. She now lectures in the History and Philosophy of Science Department at Cambridge University, where she is the SeniorTutor of Clare College Her major research speciality is science in eighteenth-century England, but she has published a range of academic and popular books on the history of science, including Newton:The Making of Genius (2002), and Pandora's Breeches:Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment (2004). She has written many reviews and articles for academic journals as well as for general publications, including HistoryToday, New Scientist, Nature, Science, TheTimes, New Statesman, and Times Literary Supplement.

Four thousand yeiars of scientific adventure and discovery—from ancient Babylon and China to genetics and particle physics. ‘Dismantling popular myths, taking a truly global view and dispensing with false idols, Fara’s highly readable survey of science’s histories is a breath of fresh air. She unerringly pinpoints the defining moods of each age, treating the past with respect and the present with discernment. This wonderfully literate book tells a story that is far, far more interesting than the tidy fictions of hindsight.’ Philip Ball, Consultant Editor of Nature ‘For a very long time, reputable historians of science have lacked the desire, the knowledge, or the nerve to undertake a book like this—an attempt to survey the development of science from Antiquity to the present, notably including non-European materials. Patricia Fara has succeeded: Science is an elegant and compact creative syntheses of the piecemeal researches of generations of historians. It deserves the widest possible readership.’ Steven Shapin, Professor of the History of Science, Harvard, and author of The Scientific Revolution

ISBN 978-0-19-922689-4

UNIVERSITY PRESS

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9 ■780199"226894' £20.00 RRP $34.95 usa